by Brian Griffith.
“Mama” Benedetta Ndolo led a village women’s group in the Iveti hills of Machakos district, in Kenya. From the top of the hill in her village you could see for miles to the northwest, over the dusty countryside stretching towards Somalia. For a whole afternoon she took me around her village, showing off her group’s accomplishments. We toured the hill-slopes terraced by village work-parties and examined cement rain-water jars, paid for one at a time by funds from the women’s group garden. Then we looked at the many small nurseries of fruit-tree seedlings. Towards evening we went to her house, and there I saw what impressed me most. It was Mama Ndolo’s latrine, out her back door, through her grove of banana trees.
I went there just as darkness was falling. The valley was deep in shadow, with orange sunbeams still streaming over the hilltop and lighting wisps of cloud. Mama Ndolo’s outhouse had no roof, only reed walls, covered with morning glory and passion fruit vines in full flower. Squatting inside, I watched as the stars winked on and the moon appeared above the trees. A roof on that latrine would have been a disaster. Instead of a private flower-garden planetarium, it would have been a dark little cell with flies buzzing inside. But the best thing about the latrine was the sound of the wind in the trees.
Three years before, Mama Ndolo’s friends had started planting tree nurseries of mango and other seedlings on their hill slopes. Years before that, at the UN Conference on Desertification in Nairobi, several African government leaders had proposed planting two great belts of forest, one across North Africa and the other south of the expanding Sahara. After that conference, most governments did little or nothing about it. Probably they were under pressure to cut spending and repay their loans. The Kenyan government advocated tree planting, but it was the village women who were the most concerned to save the land beneath their feet. Nobody paid these women, or counted the cost of their efforts. The trees were their only pay. And now the new forests of Mama Ndolo’s village stood nearly 12 feet tall.
When you sat in the latrine, you could hear the breeze sifting through a whole hillside of young trees. It was a sound like whispering, or the purring of cats. As if the trees had moods and were sighing their happiness. They seemed to be full of confidence, as if sure that Mama Ndolo’s women are here, and this place will never become desert.
From The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History