Bill Bryson's African Diary (4 page)

Friday, October 4

Fifty miles
or so south of Kisumu is Homa Bay, a listless small city of potholed streets, baking sun and an inescapable air of being at the wrong end of a long road. Most of the drive from Kisumu is along an exceedingly rough and bouncy dirt track. Interestingly, all road maps show it as a first-rate highway. This is because some years ago the World Bank gave money for the road to be paved. In the event, however, some government official or group of government officials decided to spare Kenyan workers the wearying toil of laying tarmac under a hot sun, and pocketed the money instead.

This sort of thing happens quite a lot in Kenya. Once a model of probity and rectitude, after 23 years under the increasingly reviled Daniel arap Moi, Kenya has become a case study in mismanagement and corruption. A group called Transparency International, which monitors global corruption, now ranks it as the sixth least trustworthy nation in the world, ahead of only Bangladesh, Nigeria, Paraguay, Madagascar and Angola. In one year, according to the BBC, $10 billion of public funds went missing in Kenya. Ten billion dollars! In one year! And it didn’t even top the list!

Why institutions like the World Bank and IMF, not to mention our own slumbering governments, allow this to happen is a question I cannot answer, but it has unfortunate consequences for groups like CARE. First, it means that they are left to provide many of the services that any decent government would itself provide. It also means that donations for these services are harder to secure because so many people think that any money sent to Africa goes into the pockets of despots. If anyone ever, ever, ever tries to suggest to you that this is the case, you must poke them in the eyes with something at least as big as a snooker cue, for it just isn’t so.

Money given to aid agencies like CARE—and Oxfam and Save the Children and others beyond enumerating—doesn’t pass through corrupt intermediaries. It goes straight into projects.

Incidentally, Moi is to step down in December 2002 when elections are to be held.
The universal hope, it appears, is that things will get better with a new government. “They can’t get worse,” I was told several times.

“It’s not about spending huge amounts of money, but about spending smaller amounts intelligently,” Phillip Makutsa, one of CARE’s project officers in the western province of Nyanza, told me as we bounced over more rough roads en route to the village of Ogongo Tir on the edge of the Lambwe Valley. He was explaining to me CARE’s new philosophy with regard to aid, which was essentially twofold— to make a little go a long way and to help people to help themselves. “It can be as little as narrowing the mouth of communal water containers so that people don’t dip their hands into the water and accidentally contaminate it,” Phillip said. “That one small step alone has produced a 58 percent decline in diarrhoeal outbreaks where implemented,” he added, beaming.
We were arriving at Ogongo Tir. “You’ll see what I mean here,” he added.

Ogongo Tir was a scattered village in a green valley, which, thanks to CARE, boasted a new well. It was this that we had come to see. The well, it must be said, wasn’t one of the wonders of the world. It was just a simple long-handled pump of the kind still commonly encountered at camp-grounds. My grandfather had one just like it, dating from about 1900, on his Iowa farm, so this was hardly cutting edge technology. But what a difference it has made to Ogongo Tir’s 32I households.

Before this, one of the village elders told me, during droughts and dry seasons women gathering water had to make a seven-hour round trip to a spring atop a steep and distant hill, setting out from the village at three in the morning in order to be back in time for the day’s other chores. Because of the distance, none could carry more than a single five-gallon jerry can.

Now villagers have only to stroll to a clearing on the village edge to get safe, clean, adequate supplies of water. This was such a big deal to the community that the entire village turned out to greet us. Children sang us songs and their elders made speeches. Long speeches. Impassioned speeches. Speeches in Kiswahile and speeches in English. These were seriously grateful people.

“There’s been a big change in how these things are done,” Nick told me as we were taken on a tour of a nearby vegetable garden, which blossoms even in the dry season thanks to water from the well. “It used to be that we’d build a well for a village or make some other improvement and then move on. Eventually, the pump would break or something would go wrong and the people wouldn’t know what to do. They’d come back to us and ask us to fix it because they thought of it as our well.

“So the idea now is that we help them build the well, but then the village takes complete responsibility for it. They form a committee and run it as a kind of business. They make a small charge for anyone who takes water so that they then have a reserve fund for when they need to make a repair or eventually dig a new well.”

“And has it worked?” I asked.

“Brilliantly, everywhere we’ve done it. It’s amazing how long it took aid agencies to figure out that people really, really don’t want dependency. They want to help themselves.”

“Only natural,” I observed wisely.

“Only natural,” he agreed.

We returned to our vehicles and plunged deeper into the broad and comely Lambwe Valley. At length we stopped at a small farm, where we met a sweet and eager young farmer named William Gumbo. Gumbo owns four acres of good but semi-arid land in the most gorgeous setting in the very heart of the valley. It was almost uncannily reminiscent of Tuscany or Provence—a place of dry, warm, shimmering beauty. I can’t tell you how much I wish you could have met William Gumbo, for he was an inspiration.

Until 1999 Gumbo scratched a living raising maize and millet and a few chickens.
Then CARE stepped into his life. As part of its Dak Achana (Kiswahili for “healthy households”) programme, it introduced him to a couple of agricultural specialists, who showed him ways to increase his yields and diversify crops. Today he runs a model farm—a four-acre outburst of verdant plenty in the midst of a dry, bare valley. He grows peas, tomatoes, bananas, pineapples, passion fruit, mangos and much else. Only sweet potatoes have been a failure: some livestock broke through a fence and gobbled them up.

William Gumbo loves his farm. He carries a hardback ledger in which he records every detail of his plants’ lives. Ask him about his banana trees and he will search through the book and tell you that he planted 310 of them on 20 April 2001, and then show you a weekly chronicle of their progress since. Everything is grown from seeds or cuttings. Nothing has been nursed on from a pot. It’s all from scratch.

He showed us a grove of eucalyptus trees—I,200 in all— that he has coaxed into being from seed. After a year and a half they are already 15 feet tall. In another year and a half they will provide excellent wood for timber and poles. The same amount of land devoted to maize would produce about 16,000 Kenyan shillings in income over three years. The eucalypts in the same period could produce as much as 200,000 shillings of income—over $2,500, a sum that most Kenyan farmers would find almost inconceivable.

The idea of the project is that CARE helps Gumbo create a model farm, then moves elsewhere. Gumbo, meanwhile, teaches what he has learned to his neighbours. Already he has helped 300 other farmers in the district.

The Lambwe Valley is not an easy place to prosper. It has long been notorious as one of the worst sites in east Africa for tse-tse fly. The fly populations have been much reduced in recent years, but they still take a good number of animals. The valley is also cruelly drought prone. As of early October, it hadn’t seen rain in over five months, so farming here will always be an uphill battle. Even if all goes well, William Gumbo will still be poor. His house has a dirt floor and it will be a very long time before he is luxuriating in shag carpets. But he will probably have enough to buy his kids school uniforms—a prerequisite for attending even state schools in Kenya—or textbooks or pencils or a birthday present.

William Gumbo, in short, is a happy man and he has a future. Surely every human being is entitled to at least that much.

Saturday, October 5

Well, that’s
pretty much it, I’m afraid. We had another day in the countryside before we returned to Nairobi and flew home. We visited a tea plantation in Kericho, lunched with some jolly white farmers and toured a huge
flower growing operation on the shores of Lake Naivasha, but for me the trip ended with the happy villagers at Ogongo Tir and their beloved well, and with the heroic William Gumbo.

Obviously there is only so much you can learn about a country in eight days.
We didn’t have time even to visit many of CARE’s projects in Kenya, and Kenya is only a small part of what it does. But I saw enough to realize that Kenya is a terrific country that is just full of William Gumbos and Consolata Ododas (the lady, you will recall, selling oddments at Kisumu’s market) and Jillani Ngallas (the young man who longs to be a paleontologist but probably will never make it) and 30 million other people just as individual and real. I don’t suppose they can all be saintly and deserving, but they do have one thing in common with the rest of us: they are human beings. And, like us, they get only one life apiece, so naturally they tend to appreciate it—appreciate it very much, I believe—when people from a more comfortable part of the world take the trouble to help them make theirs better. For that’s what CARE does, you see. It makes lives better, in 64 countries, thousands of times every day.

I don’t know if you are fully aware of it, but in acquiring this slender volume you didn’t actually buy a book. You made a generous donation to a worthy cause and got a free book in return, which isn’t quite the same thing. It’s much nobler. On behalf of CARE, thank you.

As I am sure the jacket conspicuously notes, my publishers, Transworld in Britain and Broadway Books in the United States, are also not taking a penny of profit from this—I know, I can hardly believe it myself—which means that a great many people behind the scenes worked hard for free to make this happen, and at the very busiest time of their working year. I think they deserve a special thanks, and most of your future purchases.

As for me and the rest of us in our party, well, we’re very grateful too—grateful to the CARE people in Kenya for showing us around, and to you for your support. And best of all, not once in the week did we get rubbed with dung.

CARE SAYS THANKYOU ...

. . . for buying
Bill Bryson’s African Diary.
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.

This book was made possible through the generosity and hard work of many people—from CARE staff and the Kenyan communities they serve, to the staff of Broadway Books and Transworld Publishers.

And, of course, this book would not have been possible without Bill Bryson, one of the world’s finest travel writers, who withstood a punishing schedule to produce his first book on Africa, the royalties from which he is donating to CARE.