Kenya Diaries: Day 17, Part 5 - BAMA Farmer Field School

On our way home from Dominion Farms, we stopped at a place called BAMA. This is a small community organization in a rural part of Kenya that is working in an area with big HIV/AIDS problems.



When we arrived at BAMA, it looked like nothing. A tiny building - that's it. My hosts, Amy and Malaki, were trying to call to see if anyone was there to show us around, but it seemed like the place was empty. I was ready to throw in the towel and leave.


BAMA

Eventually, an incredibly sweet woman came out to meet us. She brought a few chairs outside and we sat under the tree pictured above and talked. Then she showed us around.

BAMA is a community based organization [CBO] representing four communities. The name BAMA is an acronym made up of the first letter of the names of each of the communities. They do some work with Action Aid.

These communities were always very poor and had a terrible problem with African sleeping sickness and the tsetse fly. Many of the young people in these villages left and went to Lake Victoria since they couldn't make a living at home.

But the lake has a terribly high AIDS rate, and many of the young people who went there became infected with HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS takes out people in the prime of life - ages 15-49 - because 80% of transmission in Kenya is from unprotected (mostly heterosexual) sex. Often people already have children by the time they get infected, and when they die, the children are left with elderly grandparents or alone in child-headed households. There are several child-headed households in the communities BAMA serves.

Many diseases take out the very old and the very young. By taking out people in the 15-49 age group, AIDS is unique and causes unique problems. If many babies and toddlers are killed by malaria, the parents are still around, retaining knowledge about farming and having the physical ability to farm. But if the parents die and the children and elderly are left, the children often don't know how to farm yet, and neither the elderly nor the young have the capability to do the most difficult physical labor required in farming. Also, it puts a strain on the child's ability to go to school if that child must also work or grow food in order to eat every day.

So these communities formed BAMA to try to help their people make a living at home, to keep them from going to the lake and getting AIDS. The first thing the woman told us about was a cattle dip that they made. If you remember from my interview with Sidney, the Maasai man, he spoke about cattle dips too. They put pesticides in water and then have the cattle go in it to kill all of the ticks and bugs on them. The pesticide lasts for a week, and the cows must be dipped again seven days later.

Apparently, the exotic breeds are far more susceptible to Kenyan diseases than native Kenyan breeds, but I'm no expert in the tsetse fly and African sleeping sickness, so I don't know how susceptible local breeds are to that vs. exotic breeds. I have heard that the chemicals used in the dips are pretty toxic and that neem can work as an organic alternative. But a lot of development work revolves around cattle dips, and communities like BAMA feel that they need them.

If you recall, Sidney noted that during the 1990s, the government's veterinary services just collapsed. It turns out that was a result of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the IMF. So the government used to offer free cattle dips, at least where Sidney lives, if not here in Bondo, and then the dips became privatized and services were no longer free. Sidney's community handled it by pooling their resources to create their own cooperative dip. That's basically what BAMA has done too.


Cattle dip, I think

BAMA also offers a food bank for locals who are in need. Now they just have some bags of maize, and last year they had sorghum as well. She said last year they had to give the sorghum to neighbors who were starving, and last season, only maize was planted.


Bags of maize in the food bank

They also run a pharmacy. The meds here are ones for immediate emergencies. It's not a full stock of everything under the sun.


Pharmacy

They are also promoting traditional vegetables and herbal medicines. Below, you see Crotalaria brevidens, which the Luo call mitoo. It's dried, and the woman said it tastes even more delicious this way. To cook it you can rehydrate it and cook it with milk. She said you need to cook it with milk, which is what I heard from several sources while in Bondo.


Mitoo

BAMA created a terrific little brochure of traditional vegetables and their medicinal properties. I've typed it out below. One caveat to this is that I've read a study that surveyed healers in this region and there was often little agreement among them about what cures what. So some of these medicinal properties might be true, and some of the plants might just have value as food but nothing more.

The brochure is a "popular version of a research done by Maseno University in collaboration with BAMA CBO and funded by Action Aid." It says "The community is advised to promote the production and consumption of local vegetables which had earlier neglected to get the micro nutrients most needed for boosting the immunity especially in the wake of the HIV/AIDS scourage)" [sic]

• Black nightshade (local name: osuga): treats diarrhea, eye infections, 'orianyancha' yellowing of eyes (jaundice), blood clotting
  
• Cats whiskers (akeyo): Anti HIV/AIDS, through immunity boosting, anti mosquitos, controls epileptic fits, anti fungal, increase libido & induces labour pain.
  
• Rattle pod (Mitoo): Treats boils, improves appetite, 'akuoda' stomach pains and swellings
  
• Amaranth (ododo): Treats anemia, adds strength
  
• Local name: Nyasigumba: Lowers cholesterol levels
  
• Local name: Atipa: Increases weight, skin infection and digestion
  
• Cowpeas (Boo): Leaf-extract treats skin infections, epilepsy, chest pain, and snake bite.
  
• Pumpkin (susa): Anti-malaria, control sugar levels in the body
  
• Milk thistle (Achak achak): Antibacterial, improves appetite, root extracts treats measles symptoms.
  
• Stinging nettle (Dindo): Treats arthritis and controls pests
  
• Water spinach (Obudo nyaduolo): Flower buds treat ring worms and sedative (makes you sleepy)
  
• Black eyed susan (Nyawend agwata): Crushed in fat and used as purgative (yomo ich)
  
• Traditional kale (Kandhira): Seeds used for treating stomach ache
  
• Ethiopian kale (Nyar nar achak achak): Sedative, and weight control
  
• Black jack (Onyiego): Crushed to water and treats malaria, boosts immunity
  
• Jews mallow (Apoth nyar uyotna): Appetite, digestion, and skin infections
  
• Local name: Awayo: Treats eyelids, ringworms, boils, and stomach troubles
  
• Cassava leaves (It marieba): Roots important in starch for gelling purposes
  
• Sweet potatoes (It rabuon): Leaf sap pusedas sedative and treats ringworm
  
• Hyacinth bean/Lablab bean (Okuro): Lowers blood pressure
  
• Malabar spinach (Obwanda, milare): Antifungal
  
• Local name: Nyar bungu odidi: headaches, colds, and anti-fungal
  
• Mung beans (leso riadore): Treat skin infection, epilepsy, chest pain, snake bite
  
• Local name: Bombwe: Treats abscesses and boils
  
• Local name: Oinglatiang: Treat any type of stomach ache and gastric ulcers
  
• Bitter leaves (Rayue): Has anti-tumor activity (anti cancer)
  
• Amaranth (osoyi): Anti-viral compoound has been isolated from the plant [Note: This is a different local name than the other listing of amaranth. There are multiple amaranth species within Kenya, although I don't know if these are two names that are both generic to amaranth, or two names representing two species.]
  
• Horse radish tree (moringa): Controls blood sugar, eases labor pain, antibacterial and immune boosters of sore throats

The other pages of the brochure explain why people should eat each vitamin, mineral, and macronutrient. Then it has a table showing nutrient contents of various local veggies. The woman showing us around said she didn't know about the plant mitoo before this project and now she eats it. She thinks it's delicious. As I asked her about how her work here changed her diet, she added "I'm also a widow." I did not ask because I didn't think it's polite, but if her husband died of AIDS, it's likely enough that she's infected too. She told me she farms and raises a dairy goat. The dairy goats are another BAMA project.


Think there might be a few Obama fans here?

Then we met the goats...

Obama has a dairy goat project. Traditional Kenyan goat breeds are almost entirely used for meat. There's been an effort to bring in German Alpine dairy goats to promote keeping goats for milk. BAMA will not sell anyone a dairy goat without training them first on how to care for the goat, but after training, you can buy a female goat that has one German Alpine parent and one local parent for 5000 shillings ($60). A goat with 75% German Alpine genes goes for 10,000 ($120) and a purebred German Alpine goes for 15,000-18,000 ($180-$216). That's for the females.

BAMA promotes "zero grazing," which basically means confining the animals and bringing the feed to them. It's a novel concept in Kenya. All of the goats they had are purebred German Alpine. The babies in the photos are three days old. The babies will stay here to nurse for two months before they can be sold.














The goats' "zero grazing" housing setup

They told us the amount of milk depends on their feed and management. Right now in the dry season, they are producing 4 liters a day with two milkings per day. These purebred goats must be "supplemented" with purchased feeds.

BAMA keeps a German Alpine buck on hand to mate with people's goats if people want their goats' offspring to have German Alpine genes. I asked whether some of the German Alpine goats died, and she said yes some did. It sounded like they concluded that when people are first starting to raise these dairy goats, they have more success with the 50/50 goats that are mixed with the local breed than with the German Alpines. When you mix the local breed with the German Alpine, you get more adaptation to local conditions, but less milk.

I heard mixed opinions on keeping purebred exotic breeds, or even animals with one local parent and one exotic breed parent while I was in Kenya. Organizations like BAMA and another one we visited called Care for the Earth promoted them. I met a man who worked for the Kenyan Dept of Veterinary Services who keeps all purebred animals, as well as a two others who kept one purebred cow each (a Friesian for milk in one case, and a beef cow in the other). But there's a risk and an expense to keeping such a high maintenance animal like these, even if you are going to get some extra milk from them. If you keep a 50/50 or 75/25 mix, the question is whether the increase in adaptation to local conditions outweighs the resulting decrease in milk you get from having a mixed breed. I don't have the answer to that question, but I am a skeptic of these efforts to push purebred animals, particularly if people are paying so much for one. I don't know what a local breed goat costs, but if a 50/50 Alpine mix costs half the price of a purebred Alpine, then that's already saying something.

Kenya Diaries: Day 17, Part 4 - Dominion Farms, Part 4

On my 17th day in Kenya, I visited Dominion Farms, a U.S.-owned enormous rice farm that sits in between Bondo and Siaya Districts in Nyanza Province. Below is the last part of the transcript and photos from our tour.

The people with me on the tour were my hosts, Amy Lint and Malaki Obado, along with their baby, and our guide. When we left off, we were at the weir, talking about Dominion's use of water from the Yala River. The guide told us about a treatment process they use where they allow the sediment to settle out and then add chlorine to the water. Within Dominion, they have piped water from the river water that they've treated - a huge and rare luxury in this part of Kenya.

Then she mentioned they have some tilapia ponds that hold more than 60,000 fish. She said we couldn't see those ponds, but we could see some other ponds.

Me: Do you know their schedule for land reclamation? What's the total area they plan to reclaim.

Guide: I don't have access to that information.

Me: I am interested in how big this will become and in what year.

Guide: Well, you know Busia? We are going to go up to Busia.

Amy Lint: Whoa!

Guide: So that's like really huge.

You can see how big that would be yourself, but we found out later that she was referring to Busia District, not the town itself, which means it's not as big of an area as Amy first thought:


The marker shows Yala Swamp, where Dominion is now located. It's in between Siaya and Bondo Districts and it includes Lake Kanyaboli, which is home to many very valuable fish species that used to live in Lake Victoria before the introduction of the Nile Perch. Busia is straight north, near the Uganda border.

Guide: Calvin [the owner of Dominion] has a house here, but he comes once every month if he doesn't have any other engagements.

Then the conversation turned to some ponds we were passing.

Guide: So these are some of our green ponds. We have very many ponds, yeah? But we won't visit these ponds, we'll visit the ones in the back.

Malaki Obado: Why do you call it green ponds?

Guide: Because it's on bare land. There is no concrete. The modern ponds, they have concrete down there.

MO: What are you growing in the green ponds?

Guide: We have tilapia and catfish.

MO: OK, together in the same pond?

Guide: No.

MO: If it's a tilapia pond, it's just a tilapia pond?

Guide: Yeah, we actually just have the male fish alone, the female fish alone, unless you want them to brood, then we also have the fingerlings and the mothers. We have separate ponds for every stage and every sex.

Me: What do you feed them?

Guide: OK, for the fish that - OK, normally wild fish would eat, like, insects, little things they find in the water, mud, vegetation but for our fish, we make feeds for them at the fish feed mill. We make it using various material that have high protein, especially.

Me: To make them grow fast?

Guide: Yes.

Me: Do they grow that high protein material here or do they buy it or import it?

Guide: We buy it.

At this point, the conversation turned to the training center. The guide said that they train people on their rice growing techniques. Right now, there was a group of Nigerians being trained and they would go home to start up a Dominion Farm in Nigeria, owned by the same company. But, she said that the Nigerian government was actually paying for the training.

Guide: The people were selected by the government. They are young people. Young people who are selected to learn so they can go and start it themselves.

AL: Are they learning about riding the machinery?

Guide: Yes, and also growing the rice, how to prepare the land, and also many, many - how to mill the rice, package it, and sell it. And how to run the administration, everything.

Me: Do you know how much rice is sold each year?

Guide: Yeah, tons, yes.

Me: How much?

Guide: I don't have the figures off hand, but it's pretty good.

AL: So, do you think they're going to start exporting to India or Dubai as well?

Guide: Not right now. Until when we reach Busia -

AL: You can start going now to the Arab world.

Guide: Yeah.

AL: Because there's a big market for rice.

Guide: Exactly. We were surprised by the demand. Our rice is very nice, tastes good, and it's affordable.

AL: So that'll be all swampland up to Busia?

Guide: I don't know how it looks all the way up to Busia.

AL: I didn't know the swamp went all the way up to Busia.

MO: When she says Busia, she's talking about Busia District. There, the river goes. It kind of touches Bondo, Siaya, and there's Busia kind of at the end.

Guide: So the river is meandering like this, yeah? So in between those meanders, that's the area we are talking about.

AL: So is there a plan to start Dominion Uganda? The Nile and all that?

Guide: I don't know if that was really being thought of.

AL: Who does all the sorting and grading?

Guide: That is at the rice mill, but unfortunately we cannot enter the rice mill. So right now we will go to the rice mill.

[Amy talked her into it later and we did go in]

AL: So this, post-harvest - is it machine too? Or people are doing it?

Guide: What?

AL: Sorting, grading.

Guide: Everything is done by machine, milling, grading, even packaging. The one thing that I see is manpowered is maybe baling. You put the rice in bales, you put it on pallet, then you carry it to the warehouse, but everything else is just machine.

AL: Oh ok. So even sorting rice and such - it's done by machine?

Guide: Yeah.

AL: How do you feel about that? Because there is such a potential to give a lot of jobs to people but it's all done by machine. And at a time when we need jobs. People are ready to work but so many jobs are given to machine.

Guide: OK, um, it's true. Yeah, okay. We really employ very few people.

AL: Like 400 people on all this land? That's really very few people. And even, a quarter, 25 percent of that is security.

Guide: No, the security firm is separate.

Me: A contractor?

AL: Oh, ok.

Guide: Yes. And we work with contractors mainly. Like the cleaners, security.

The cleaners just clean a few white coats they have people wear when working in the mill.

Me: Do you notice many mosquitoes?

Guide: Yeah. Eh, mosquitoes are minimal. I think I am used to it now. Even during the day you can get bitten.

Me: Really. Do they spray for mosquitoes?

Guide: No. But maybe they used to spray at some point. The mosquitoes are really reducing.

Me: After harvest, if you are not going to let the same plants produce a second crop, how long before you plant another crop. Do you leave it to rest?

Guide: Yes. It rests for some time, depending on the nutrients, the analysis.

Me: Like a year, or a month?

Guide: No, it can't be a year. Several months.

Me: So when you say there are four crops a year, it's not four crops in the same field.

Guide: No.

Me: Do you know how many crops you could get in a year in the same field?

Guide: It could be like two, maximum three.

Me: That sounds much more normal. When I heard four I was like 'what?'

At this point, Malaki asked about a machine alongside the harvester. The guide began to explain it and I realized I'd seen the same thing in cornfields in Iowa. You get a machine to take the harvest directly from the harvester and carry it to the mill, and then the harvester can continue working without ever stopping. The guide confirmed that this was the case.

Guide: And also, it minimizes spillages. Human labor, it provides for many people to eat, but mechanization is highly efficient. Like, if we had to hire people to cut the rice, it would be so expensive.

Me: How much would have you have to pay them?

Guide: OK, that is maybe casual labor.

No answer. I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like 200 shillings - $2.40.

AL: At least you harvest the bananas by hand?

Guide: Yes.

AL: There's no banana plucking machines [laughs]

MO: This is jatropha, can you tell me about this?

Guide: It is a project that got started. We were supposed to start producing the fuel, but I don't know. It stalled.

Jatropha, a biofuel crop. They tried it and abandoned it here. They've tried and abandoned many things, including a honey project and a poultry project. They are now working on a soybean project to see if it works as something they might continue in the future.

AL: All this machinery came from the U.S.?

Guide: Yes, by sea.

We finally arrived at the mill, and I took a photo before they told me I wasn't supposed to take pictures.



Ditto on the tilapia ponds. If you look at the corner of the pond, there's an interesting bird sitting there - that's why I took the picture.



The tilapia operation was disgusting. The ponds are made by digging the earth out and then adding a pipe for water to flow in and one to take the water out so that the water flows all the time. Because tilapia are native to this part of the world, I doubt the water needs to be heated like it does in the U.S.

My recording of our visit to the tilapia pond isn't clear. Basically, when the baby tilapia are born, they are transferred into a pond where they are given a hormone that changes all the females to males. They remain there for one month. After that, all of the fish are male. The reason they told us this is because "in fish, we believe that males grow faster." It sounded to me like they make them all male is so that they don't mate. If the females were devoting energy to breeding, then they would grow slower. I've also heard something about how having fertile males and females result in a crowded pond with lots of small fish instead of fewer big ones.

The all male tilapia are fed a feed made in the mill, basically from cheap calories and some vitamin/mineral supplements. This feed is different from the one given to the fish used for breeding, since - if I understand it right - it would make the fish actually too fat to breed.

There are 60 ponds in the part of the farm we visited. They are building more ponds on the other side of the farm. My recording is very hard to hear, and I could not catch how many ponds they plan to build total or how many fish each pond holds, but they plan to make an awful lot of ponds, and each pond holds thousands of fish.

From the fish ponds, we went to the mill. In the mill, the machines do everything. The rice is first sorted to remove large debris and smaller debris. The small debris is sold as animal feed. The husk is removed and used as a mulch. The bran and germ are removed and sold as animal feed. Then the white rice is polished and graded and packaged. Grading is based on the length of the grain.

Finally, as we left, Amy and Malaki bought some fish and rice for dinner and I took a photo of one of the nearby houses. There are communities on either side of the farm, right up to the gates. Since the farm diverted the river, they have made available a few canals of water for locals to use for washing, or drinking, or whatever. You see local people gathering water on either side of the farm. God knows what's in that water.


A house just outside of Dominion on the Siaya side.


A community just outside of Dominion on the Bondo side.

That night, the family ate the tilapia and rice for dinner. I didn't. I'm not eating something that was born female and switched to male with hormones. Nor do I want to eat anything that got sprayed with pesticides from an airplane. Malaki's dad remarked that the locally caught wild tilapia taste sweeter than the fish from Dominion. I held my tongue and didn't tell him how the tilapia at Dominion were produced. I was his guest and did not want to ruin his meal.

Kenya Diaries: Day 17, Part 3 - Dominion Farms, Part 3

On my 17th day in Kenya, I visited Dominion Farms, a U.S.-owned enormous rice farm that sits in between Bondo and Siaya Districts in Nyanza Province. Below is the transcript and photos from our tour. I feel bad for our guide. She was this sweet girl, just out of college - and she got stuck with us and our questions :)




Before visiting Dominion, I spoke to a man who had worked there a few years before. He told me that they would catch these tiny birds in nets and then he would take them home to eat them. He was pretty pleased about it, saying that the birds tasted very sweet. So I asked our guide how they dealt with bird pests.

Guide: Basically what happens is the biggest pest is a Quelea quelea bird, it's really tiny. So they come in millions. They move from the nesting areas to the roosting areas. And they come in the morning for breakfast and for supper in the evening. And each bird eats like 10 grams. And they move in thousands. So imagine if everybody wants to take 10 grams of your rice. It can be a real pest, eh? So we control them. We have permission from the Environmental Authority to control them.

Me: How do you do that? I can imagine it would be difficult.

Guide: It's terrible. The roosting areas where they go in the evenings, they kill them.

Me: With what?

Guide: Just chemicals. Specifically. It kills only the Quelea quelea birds, nothing else.

Amy Lint: How do you get them?

The next bit was difficult to hear on my recording because Amy's baby was talking pretty loudly over the guide, but she said that some guys are in charge of finding where the birds roost and then they spray them with the chemicals. It's a good bet the chemical is Fenthion, an organophosphate that Pesticide Action Network classifies as a Bad Actor, a potential ground water contaminant, and a suspected endocrine disruptor, with moderate acute toxicity. It's not allowed in the United States.

Back to the talk about pests...

Guide: You know, aphids? Then there is the stem borer. Those are the main ones. So we just control them.

Me: Is there a chemical that works best on the stem borer? Or a method that works best?

Guide: We just use the aerial spray.

Me: Now are there ever workers working when the plane comes, or are they told to move away?

Guide: Oh, they can never spray where the workers are.

Me: They cannot spray where the workers are?

Guide: No, no. There are different sections. They cannot come and spray where the people are because that's poisonous to them. So, for the birds, we also have ladies with the jerrycans and stones inside and they shake them really loud and the birds go away. But you see right now, we have the women in this area gapping, they won't be in this area, the aerial spray.

We were interrupted as I saw a really cool bird and tried to get a photo but missed. We were driving along with kind of wild, canal-like areas along the side of the road, and there was lots of wildlife in those areas.




Bird of some sort

Guide: Basically, what you see, the birds that we have, except now there are pelicans as well. And they eat our fish.

Me: The tilapia, that you don't want them to eat?

Guide: Well, if you look in here, you see lots of fish, frogs, they eat that stuff. But at our fish ponds... [inaudible]

Me: Do you know how much the rice yields per acre?

Guide: Anything between 1.3 tonnes and 2.27 tonnes.

Me: Metric tonnes? Like 1000 kg?

Guide: Yes. Depending on the conditions, the season, the weather..

Me: Birds?

Guide: Birds. It depends on so much. Or even the soil, maybe we've used so many chemicals and it's become very acidic. We need to control that. We do that by liming.

AL: So somebody's out there doing all that, right? Like they are taking those measurements and such?

Guide: Actually, yes. Actually, that's what I do. I am in Quality Control. So we try and make sure that -

Me: Do you know what's burning and why? Is that - ? What's the use of burning?

Guide: We usually clear land of weeds by burning. It's fast and efficient.

Me: Is that a common practice in rice cultivation? To burn?

Guide: I don't know if it's common elsewhere, but here we do. Because it's a very big - it's massive land - there's no other way you can actually [inaudible].

So these are the canals on either side.

Me: And it brings water from the swamp?

Guide: I'll show you where it brings water from but I don't think you can go. It's a bit scary.

Me: What, are there crocodiles?

Guide: [laughing] OK, it just scares me. No, no crocodiles. It's just the height and the water is massive and everything.

So you see what happens in the land, it's like a staircase, yeah? One field is above the other and the other like that. The inlet is higher than the outlet, yeah? So when we grow rice in a certain area, we make sure that the fields are in a certain order. So that it goes [inaudible - but she explained basically that the water goes from one canal, downhill by gravity from field to field, and back to the canal]

Me: So it's a closed circuit?

Guide: A closed circuit, yeah.

AL: Everybody that's working here is a Kenyan?

The guide explained that some Americans came initially to do some training and then they went back home. The rest are Kenyan. But later we established that there was one white guy working here still - the pilot of the crop duster. The guide thought he might be from near Naivasha or something.

Then Malaki saw a monitor lizard - a really big one. I couldn't see it. Before long, we saw another one. They have poisonous bites and poisonous tails. And they are HUGE - four feet long and bright green.

Guide: That's our training center over there. We are having some Nigerians over. We are training them just like we were trained.

AL: For how long have the Nigerians been around?

Guide: I think, like six months. But it's intensive, it's intensive.

AL: [surprised] For that long? So are they starting a Dominion in Nigeria?

Guide: I think so.

AL: You don't know??!!

Guide: Ok, yes, they are.

AL: They are opening a Dominion in Nigeria now, and these guys are going to start it up.

Me: The same corporation from Oklahoma?

Guide: Yeah.

AL: Owned by the same guy?

Guide: Yeah.

AL: So what did you get your degree in? Rice?

Guide: No, food science and technology. So it's like, the whole thing from beginning to the package. Or let's say to the plate, cuz we also do sensory tests.

Me: So the rice that they grow here, can we buy it here in Bondo?

Guide: Yeah.

AL: And at the farm, right?

Guide: Yes, the farm prices are cheaper.

Malaki Obado: And vegetables?

Guide: Yeah. We have bananas. Plantain. Vegetables, no. We used to have horticulture before.

MO: I heard there was a section where locals grow. I want to see that.

Guide: Yeah! Oh yeah! I'll ask around, cuz it's at the very edges of - yeah. But they sell some vegetables there.

AL: How much is the rice?

Guide: Rice, depending on the grade, it's like 85 shillings per kg. (about US$1)

AL: And if I want to buy, like, 50 lbs?

Guide: 50 lbs is kilograms?

AL: What about 50 kgs?

Guide: We sell them in 25kg bags, but the grade that we sell in the bags is different from the ones we sell at the market.

MO: The market is a better grade?

Guide: Yeah.

Me: So if I went to, like, Tuskys or Nakumatt [two grocery chains], they would have it?

Guide: Yes.

Me: Which grade is that?

Guide: The packets, we have premium and grade one.

Me: In Tuskys?

Guide: Maybe, yes. What's Nakumatt?

AL: Do you export any?

Guide: Yes. Uganda.

AL: Only to Uganda?

Guide: Actually, we had expanded markets very much. Then the demand was a bit high. And we are still reclaiming land and so until we are able to reach a sustainable amount of production, we have closed most of our markets. Like, we used to sell in Nairobi. We are working on that. We are reclaiming more and more land.

Me: Will I ever be able to buy your rice in the United States?

Guide: Oh that would be something!

Then we started talking about the bananas a bit. They have both plantains and sweet bananas.

Guide: We use the tissue culture techonology [for the bananas]. So in terms of technology, mainly the mechanization. Everything is so heavily mechanized. The labor is done by machines.

Me: But I'd imagine, the breeding, to come up with this variety of rice, to mature in 120 days, produce a high yield

Guide: - and direct seeding -

Me: And direct seeding, that must have been something.

Guide: And it's resistant to most diseases and insects. It's very good. The breeding really took a long while.

Me: I'd be very curious to know how that was done. Like, is it a shorter rice plant than most varieties of rice?

Guide: Yeah. There is one that's short and there's one that's the regular size.

At that point, we came up to the weir. I asked about the papyrus and malaria.


One side of the canal


The other side of the canal

Me: But I don't see papyrus.

Guide: There is no papyrus, not here. See, these are the two main canals. One is the outer canal. We have to make sure we kill weeds so that the water can flow. You know, sometimes the plant can [obstruct the water]... We do control papyrus.

Me: But haven't you had malaria problems?

Guide: Oh yes.

Me: How do you deal with that?

Guide: We don't do anything major, just mosquito nets. Treated mosquito nets.

Me: For the workers?

Guide: And also for the people around this area.

Me: You provide them?

Guide: No, the health center provides them.

Me: Is that part of the Kenyan government?

Guide: Yes. They are doing a good job. So this is the weir.

A weir is like a dam that can be opened and shut. You could see the Yala River flowing through the weir. Dominion re-routed the upstream part of the river to flow through this weir. Ultimately, they plan to do hydroelectric power, which will screw with the river downstream.


The weir


The weir


The weir


The river downstream from the weir

Me: Did any people live on this land before Dominion came and took it?

Guide: It was a swamp.

Me: It was a swamp, completely uninhabited?

Guide: Yeah. Then after Dominion cleared, Dominion gave some land to the locals.

AL: I think that's not true. Are you sure about that? I think that some people were paid money and sold their land. You're very sure?

Guide: Yeah. It was all under water. And then what happened, Dominion came in and cleared in. So after directing the water [inaudible]

The guide's only had her job for six months. Dominion's been here since 2003. And the guide isn't originally from this area. So she only knows what Dominion has told her.

We stood at the weir and the guide got one of the workers there to demonstrate how they do maintenance on it - which involves some dangerous work walking around below a bridge over the river. The birds around the weir were pretty incredible. I saw some hamerkops and other kinds of birds I didn't recognize.

Guide: This is our weir. So depending on whether we need water at the time or not, we open or close it. So we chose the River Yala because number one, it's very deep. And it goes like this - from high area down to [inaudible]

AL: So how about the Nigerians? Which river?

Guide: [laughing] Actually, I don't know.

AL: Maybe we can ask the Nigerians.

Me: Will you also grow rice in Nigeria?

Guide: Yeah.

Me: How many security people are employed here?

The security people are contractors, not Dominion employees, which means the number of people employed by Dominion total includes Dominion employees (estimated by the guide as 400 people) plus the number of security guards.

Security guy: We are over 100.

MO: So is this the main river coming in?

SG: But the main one was that one. After constructing this one, it was diverted. This one - this is [inaudible] and the former one was [inaudible].

MO: So this wasn't the river before?

Guide: The whole river was diverted?

SG: Yeah.

Jesus christ.

Through a confusing discussion, it was explained that the river is diverted through the weir and then back to its original route, and Dominion only takes the water it needs from the river - not the entire river. Eventually, Dominion wants to use the weir to generate their own hydroelectric power.

While we stood over the weir and I looked at interesting birds, the guide explained that she's severely short sighted. She asked about my glasses and said she had some but lost hers. She's trying to do her job without them and gets migraines as a result. It's very expensive to buy more glasses. I said, "It's a shame your employer can't help you." She replied, "Most employers here don't." She said you're on your own for eyes and teeth.

Here are some interesting birds we saw at Dominion, although I don't know what any of them are:













In the next post on Dominion: Tilapia and the rice mill

Kenya Diaries: Day 17, Part 2 - Dominion Farms, Part 2

On my 17th day in Kenya, I visited Dominion Farms, a U.S.-owned enormous rice farm that sits in between Bondo and Siaya Districts in Nyanza Province.



To get a tour of Dominion Farms, you need an appointment. Malaki's cousin used to work at Dominion, and he hooked Amy and Malaki (my hosts) up with a contact there, who gave them an appointment.

We drove from Malaki's village to Dominion, arriving at a large, guarded gate on the Bondo side of the swamp. There was some confusion as we tried to get in. The guard did not want to let us in, it seemed, and Amy tried to call her contact's cell phone. He kept telling her he was busy with a big group of Nigerians, but as luck had it, he was right near us - and so were all of the Nigerians. As he talked to the guard and helped secure our admission, the Nigerians kept trying to take pictures of us strange-looking white people, shoving cameras right in our faces.

Once we were through the gate with instructions to go to the office to sign in, we were on our own. I had a smudge on my camera lens, but we could see - and I took pictures of - a combine in the field and a crop duster spraying god knows what from the sky.





Both outside and inside the gate, one could see people carrying water or other things on their heads. All around, we could see a diverse array of birds, which made me really excited to see them, and horrifically sad that they were losing their habitat and ingesting pesticides.




African spoonbill


Chemical sludge in the water


Crested Cranes. You always see them in pairs.


Not sure about the species of these


A kind of grainy close-up, in case someone else can recognize 'em


That dust cloud is NOT just the smudge on my camera lens. Is that simply exhaust fumes or is it the topsoil eroding away?

At last, we reached the office, which was just outside Dominion's Siaya gate.


Just outside the office, which has more security

For a tour, Dominion charges a hefty fee for each small tour bus, and more for a large tour bus. Amy tried to bargain the price down since we were just a small car with three adults and a baby, and because they were locals. Shouldn't locals have inexpensive access to see this farm that is right in their backyard? Apparently not. I paid the full fee for our "tour bus" of three people, Amy signed the guest book, and we were officially "in."

With that, a tour guide got in our car, and off we went. We might have been lucky because she was new - we were the first group she gave a tour to - and she wasn't very good at evading questions she wasn't supposed to answer. However, on the flipside, she also didn't know a lot of answers to questions we asked.

The guide - a very attractive woman who had recently graduated college - began by saying that in 2003, Calvin Burgess, the founder, began Dominion Farms. They began by clearing the land and preparing fields for rice farming. But before they were ready to do rice, they had a few other projects like growing maize that they did in the meantime. Once the land was ready for rice, they let the other projects go.

Guide: The reason we stopped growing maize is that the land on which you grow maize does not need as much preparation as the land on which you grow rice. So on your left, you see the rice, and you see the bananas? That's rice husk. We use it for mulching to get rid of the grass.

So basically, the rice milling we started in 2006 and it's been going on strong. So we have almost 4000 acres we've reclaimed. This was all a swamp. There used to be nothing here. It was just a total swamp. So we had to reclaim it. If you go to the weir, you'll see how we reclaimed it. We use the water for many things. There is rice. If you go this way, there is rice. There is, of course, fish, and that's basically it. And then there's domestic use on the other side. That is, like, houses.

Amy Lint: How many workers are here?

Guide: I'm not very sure but I think not more than 400.

AL: So everybody has housing on property or does some come from outside?

Guide: Most of them are the villagers.

AL: I mean, so they stay outside the compound?

Guide: Yeah, they stay in their homes.

AL: Some commute?

Guide: It's a very short distance, like 10 minutes. So they just walk from their houses.

Here, what you are seeing is a flooded field. It has been planted, and then after planting we put in water immediately. Then it stays for four to five days.

A just planted flooded rice field

Guide: Then we drain out the water and harden the crop. We let it get used to the sun, because we don't do wet farming. We do not put it in water from day 1 to the end. So that means if we do not harden it off, it may die easily. So after four to five days we drain it, leave it to harden for one month, we flash back water, and wait for it to mature.

An unflooded field being hardened off.

At this point, I was getting into my groove. I'd seen some rice in the Philippines but then I read an entire dissertation about the International Rice Research Institute, so I had a few questions for her...

Me: So you don't transplant?

Guide: No, we don't transplant. That's what we do back where I come from. Here we just do direct seeding.

[Historically, rice was always planted in a seedbed and then transplanted into the field. During the Green Revolution, IRRI was very interested in finding a way to direct seed the rice and skip the transplanting step. So the fact that they direct seed is interesting for that reason.]

Me: Do you use a machine, or do people do the direct seeding by hand?

Guide: We use machines. You'll see them. That's where we are going. The first stop will be machinery.

Me: Do you know the variety you grow?

Guide: Yes. It's a special breed that was actually made here. It's - okay, they are just numbers. It's 103 and 107.

Me: Are they early maturing?

[Another goal of the Green Revolution. If the rice matures quickly, then you can grow several crops on the same land each year.]

Guide: They take 120 days.

AL: So what are all these people doing here?

Guide: The ladies at the end? They are either gapping or weeding, but considering the field, they must be gapping. That means, once we have grown the seed and you drained off the water, there isn't 100% viability. Some seed doesn't grow. So there are some fields that we have to grow seedlings that we use to fill in the gaps so that we have a full crop. So that's what they are doing.

Me: So you do that by hand and weeding by hand?

Guide: Weeding is also done by hand.

Me: Do you also use some herbicides?

Guide: Yes. We have an integrated method of controlling weeds. That is the manual method of hand weeding, then there is the selective herbicide, and there is also the flooding. You know, rice is a friend of water, so it grows well in water. But other plants do not grow in water.

Me: Do you know which herbicides are the best ones to use?

Guide: Maybe we can ask somebody else. But there is a plane that is going around right now, and it is spraying the herbicides. It also sprays fungicides and fertilizer.

Me: All of that together?

Guide: No, we have a schedule.

AL: What's the schedule? How often?

Guide: We try to minimize the chemicals we use. But there is a pre-emergent and a post-emergent herbicide. That means before the weeds start to grow, then after the rice has started growing and the weeds as well.

So this is a harvester. We use a combined harvester. So here we've already harvested it. We may leave it like this and get another crop. It's called a rattoon. Or we may just cultivate it again and wait another 120 days. But if it's a rattoon, it only takes two months and the cost of production is much much lower.

Me: Is this ready to harvest?

Guide: Yeah, this is ready to harvest.

Mature rice


Stuff growing among the rice. I thought I saw something move in there and tried to see if it was a frog or something, but saw nothing.

AL: How many acres are under production at once? Do you use the same land every time or do you rotate?

Guide: We have to do rotation. When this harvest is ending, the next one is ready, so that the mill always has rice.

AL: And how many acres is under cultivation at one time?

Guide: Right now, we are harvesting like 10 fields and the acreage is like between 40 and 70 acres each field. And we are harvesting ten of them right now. And that will last us until the next harvest. So as you see, it's different stages. So there's a program that's used to run that.

So this is basically our machinery area. We have tractors. We have the disc plow, this is our lawn mower. We have serrated disc plows and just plain disc plows.

Let me just go through the land reclamation process. What happens, there's the really, really big ones. There's the bulldozers and the land planes that go and clear the land first of all. Then we go and till it, primary and secondary tillage. After that, maybe we go and dig the ground and then put in the seeds, and compact the soil so that it doesn't wash off the seeds.

Malaki Obado: How do you fuel it?

Guide: Oh yeah we have fueling stations, three of them.

MO: Within the farm?

Guide: Yes, within the premises. So a tanker comes and brings the fuel.

AL: For how long do you plan to grow rice here?

Guide: Umm, I don't think we are ever planning to stop.

AL: Like, who owns the land. Isn't it the Kenyan government?

Guide: Yes. I don't have access to the agreement, so I don't know how long.

Coming up in the next diary: Dominion's canals and weir, tilapia farming, and the mill.

Kenya Diaries: Day 17, Part 1 - Dominion Farms, Part 1

On my 17th day in Kenya, I visited Dominion Farms, a U.S.-owned enormous rice farm that sits in between Bondo and Siaya Districts in Nyanza Province. See below.

My introduction to Dominion Farms first came from a document called "Land grabbing in Kenya and Mozambique A report on two research missions – and a human rights analysis of land grabbing," published by the FIAN International Secretariat in 2010.

The Yala Swamp wetlands are located on the northeastern shoreline of Lake Victoria and are crossed by the equator. It is one of the most important riparian and floodplain wetlands around the lake, and indeed one of the largest in Kenya. The swamp forms the mouth of both the Nzoia and Yala Rivers and is a freshwater deltaic wetland arising from backflow of water from Lake Victoria as well as the rivers’ floodwaters. It provides a very important habitat for refugee populations of certain fish species which have otherwise disappeared from the lake. The wetlands cover an area commonly cited as 17,500 hectares (175 km2) and contain three freshwater lakes: Kanyaboli (1,500 hectares), Sare, and Namboyo. Other reports suggest that the swamp is much larger with a total area of 38,000 - 52,000 hectares. The swamp stretches 25 km from W-E and 15 km from N-S at the lakeshore.

This huge wetland ecosystem, third largest in the country after the Lorian Swamp and the Tana River Delta, provides major ecological and hydrological functions and is a major source of livelihoods for the neighboring communities. It is a highly productive ecosystem. According to Birdlife International, “The Yala swamp complex is by far the largest papyrus swamp in the Kenyan sector of Lake Victoria, making up more than 90% of the total area of papyrus. The swamp acts as a natural filter for a variety of biocides and other agricultural pollutants from the surrounding catchment, and also effectively removes silt before the water enters Lake Victoria. The site supports an important local fishery for the Luo and Luhya people who live to its south and north, respectively”.

Remember what malaria expert Andrew Githeko said about papyrus swamps. They don't have any malaria. Clear the swamp and turn it into a rice paddy and the malarial mosquitoes will thank you.

The Yala swampland is a trust land under the custody of the Siaya and Bondo County councils on behalf of the government. With a population of about half a million, it is densely populated. For a long time, the local people accessed it and used it in their various daily activities on a free access basis. With the entry and take over by a US based company in 2003, this came to an abrupt halt and resulted in a loss of one of the most important assets for the local community to secure their livelihoods – the land.

In 2003, Dominion Farms Ltd, a subsidiary of Dominion Group of Companies based in Edmond, Oklahoma, USA, made its appearance in the Yala swamp. The initial proposal was that Dominion would engage in rice production, in part of the swamp known as Area I, covering about 2,300 hectares. This land portion had been reclaimed by the Lake Basin Development Authority (LBDA) before 1970 and previously used for agricultural activity, mainly to produce cereals, pulses and horticultural crops. Later in the same year, Dominion entered into a lease agreement with both the Siaya and Bondo County Councils covering 6,900 hectares of the 17,500 hectare wetlands under the Yala Swamp Integrated Development Project for duration of 25 years, with a possibility of extension. Eventually, Dominion proposed to cover the entire swamp region of 17,500 hectares.

Dominion was ushered in by a coalition of local politicians and evangelical pastors who even organized massive demonstrations in favor of the investment. At the beginning there was much optimism among the population: Dominion had promised jobs, school, clinics and an upsurge of the local economy in general. The infrastructure left behind by LBDA was worn down and poverty was rife in the malaria-infested swamp region.

However, disillusion set in soon. According to residents of Siaya and Bondo counties, there was employment for some 200 workers for no more than six months when brushwood and undergrowth was removed in the area. For instance, a 60 year old man was hired as a subcontractor with a team of twelve. The workers were paid 200 shillings per day (approximately 2.6 USD) and the team leader received an additional 50 shillings. Today, according to the villagers in Bondo and Siaya,there is permanent employment only for a handful of watchmen (60, according to Dominion’s homepage) who are paid around 7,000 shillings (approximately 90 USD) per month. A watchman questioned by the research team at the gate of Dominion farm refused to reveal details about his contract and said that he was not allowed to speak to strangers.

In the rice fields, women can be seen armed with sticks to chase away the birds which prey on the cereal. According to villagers, they have to stand in the mud from dusk to dawn for a miserable pay and even remain there when the plantation is sprayed with pesticides. Neighbors suspect it is DDT as fowl and plants have died after the spraying. There is ample evidence of poisoned fowl and plants in the vicinity of the plantation. Villagers claim that even the cattle are destroyed by contaminated water. When interviewed, a villager replied “We took the livestock to market and found that the liver was rotten. We had to bury them, could not even allow dogs to eat them.” Dominion is indeed alleged to have sought an exemption from the worldwide ban of DDT from Kenya’s Ministry of Health supposedly to combat malaria. The incidence of malaria, however, is still high. Some claim it is higher now than before Dominion built dykes and cut off the natural flow of the swamp waters.

Charming place, huh? About the DDT, I personally saw no evidence and I heard rumors they were using carbofuran but could not get my source to give me any credible proof or way to verify that. But they certainly are spraying something - I saw it myself and took pictures. The number of people employed has grown a bit too, although not by much, and it appears that locals only get the unskilled, low wage jobs while educated outsiders get the higher paid positions. By the time I visited in February 2012, the women standing in rice paddies scaring away birds had shifted from shaking sticks at them to containers filled with rocks.

In 2003, an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was commissioned by the NEMA for large-scale rice production. Authorities approved the EIA specifically for rice irrigation in a 2,300 hectare-area (about 13% of the Yala Swamp territory). Almost immediately Dominion began building irrigation dykes and a weir, airstrips and roads, and announced plans to build a hydroelectric plant and a major aquaculture venture, including fish farms, a fish processing factory and a fish mill factory, all of which could damage a fragile ecosystem far beyond the designated 2,300 hectare area.

Dominion Farm Limited operates on the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by Dominion directors and the chairmen of Bondo and Siaya county councils in May, 2003. According to this MoU, the councils pledge to lease to Dominion another 3,200 hectares approximately (“the Additional Area”) in addition to 3,700 hectares – in total 6,900 hectares - set aside for large scale agricultural purposes. The MoU makes no reference to those who may live on the land earmarked for lease to Dominion. A lawyer in Nairobi, who was commissioned by the Institute of Law and Environmental Governance, assumes that there must be thousands of people who have been in occupation of the land by virtue of ancestral rights. One analysis criticizes that “no mention is made of these people. It is inconceivable that 3700 hectares of arable/agricultural land in a rural area would be lying idle without even persons who may be referred to as squatters. Provision must therefore be made for the original occupants. In my view, the County Councils should have given these individuals first priority if this land was required to be allocated or leased out to anyone.”

Indeed, there are entire villages of farmers whose families had been there for generations in the “Additional Area”. The majority do not have any titles to prove their claims. Some, however, had actually purchased the land and were assigned a parcel number which was supposed to be later replaced by a formal title deed. For example, the father of a 33 year old farmer from Aduwa village bought eight acres (roughly three hectares) of land in 1975. The soil is extremely fertile which has made the family quite prosperous...

In 2004, Dominion offered to buy his land for 45,000 shillings/acre (approximately 600 USD), roughly a third of the market price. The farmer refused because he knew that for the meager compensation he would be unable to buy a plot the same size and equal quality anywhere else. One acre yields 24 bags of maize per harvest. At a price of 3,000 shillings (about 400USD) per bag of maize and two harvests a year, each acre produces around 144,000 shillings (around 1,893USD), more than thrice what Dominion offered to pay for the land. A few weeks after refusing to sell his land, the farmer found his fields flooded and his crops destroyed. He is sure that Dominion had opened the sluices of the weir to inundate the plots of stubborn farmers. When he complained, he was chased by the police “who were ferried in Dominion vehicles.”

The same happened to another farmer. Of a nine acre plot, eight acres were flooded. Dominion paid 45,000 shillings for this one acre and took the whole plot. The farmer says he accepted out of need. When he went to complain about the flooding, Dominion sent him to the county council as the owner of the land: “The county council said, the area is for government, you cool down, nothing will be done.” In another case, a 29 year old farmer, whose father possesses 15 acres in Syaia county directly adjacent to the Dominion estate, reports that an offer by Dominion to buy his parcel came immediately after six acres were flooded. The family refused. A woman 60 years of age from Yoro village, Bondo, says that the deliberate flooding of her land, inherited from her late husband who died in 1989, destroyed her crops of maize, beans, vegetables, 40 heads of cattle and five houses. Another farmer, 50 years old, who lives in the same village, lost 30 heads of cattle, 45 sheep and 60 goats in a flooding. Complaints with the local authorities were not attended. According to InterPress Service (ips) “the government has dismissed such allegations saying it is not aware of any complaints from communities in the Yala River area.”

“The idea behind the flooding is a way of pushing people away”, says a member of Siaya County Council. He alleges that Dominion controls all the local institutions: “They even managed to bribe the media. When floods occur you won’t see media.” The member, who has been campaigning against Dominion for several years, says that he was offered the post of PR officer by Dominion with a monthly salary of 120,000 shillings, airtime for the mobile phone of 7,000 shillings per week, and a car with fuel. He refused. The member, who wants to be reelected in 2011 and become chairman of the county council, accuses local politicians of having accepted bribes: “Some MPs have built their houses with Dominion money”. The mansion of a former MP stands on a hill overlooking the Southern shore of Lake Kanyaboli. It is fenced in and guarded by a watchman. The power line ends at his house. He is the man who initially brought Dominion to the swamp.

So... welcome to Dominion... My goal was to find out how much of this report I could personally verify by visiting and see what else there was to know about Dominion Farms.

Kenya Diaries: Day 14 - The Kisumu Yacht Club

On the 13th day of my trip, I flew from Nairobi to Kisumu. It's a very short flight, but would have been a very long bus-ride. The next day, I arranged to meet a man named Andrew Githeko, who turned out to be kind of a big deal. And by kind of a big deal, I mean that he was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore.

When I arrived in Kisumu, I got in a cab and gave the driver the name of a hotel I found online. I had no idea if it was any good, but since none of the hotels I found online seemed to have working phone numbers listed or much information available about them, I was going to take my chances. If nothing else, there was another hotel two doors down I could walk to. But the car didn't even leave the airport parking lot for at least 30 minutes. The road was closed down because the Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, was expected to pass. He was meeting the President of Uganda. Odinga, the cab driver told me, was from Bondo District, where I would spend most of the next week. The streets were lined with Kenyans who wanted to see him.

The hotel was nice enough, and they charged 1500 shillings ($18) for a room without a TV or 2000 ($24) shillings for one with a TV. Only they didn't have any TV-less rooms available. I didn't want to pay for a TV I can't watch anyway, so I walked to the other hotel to see what it was like. They had only one rate, 1700 shillings. So I paid for one night. It was a bad idea.

The place was a mosquito-ridden hole. It was so hot that I got under the mosquito net and then sat there in my underwear, using my computer. The room had two sockets, but only one worked at a time. I had to alternate between running the fan and charging my computer. The light in the bathroom did not work, and the next day I found out the shower had no hot water. Plus there was no toilet seat. After eating breakfast and avoiding the pitcher of milk that had a fly floating in it, I took my luggage over to the first hotel and got a room without a TV but WITH a toilet seat, hot water, and enough electricity to use the fan and charge the computer at once.

Then Andrew picked me up. Initially I planned to visit the East Africa Dairy Development project on this day. I'd been emailing with them and I really wanted to learn about their work. It's funded by the Gates Foundation and run by Heifer International and the International Livestock Research Institute. But my contact had gone totally incommunicado with me, so I told Andrew I was free. Since he was free too, we decided it was a good time to meet. I had NO idea what to expect.

Andrew showed up in a nice car and drove us straight to the Kisumu Yacht Club. We walked in and he ordered a drink - some kind of hard alcohol, I think. I figured this was probably the right time to try Kenya's beer, Tusker, so I did. It's kind of like Budweiser. I switched over to water without finishing my beer.

The yacht club was lovely, as I imagine yacht clubs generally are. It was right on the shores of Lake Victoria, the second largest lake in the world, which Kenya shares with Uganda and Tanzania. We said our hellos to the regulars, and spoke to an American wearing a USAID hat.

It turned out he was in the Peace Corps. His family was visiting him, so he brought them here for the day. He told me to check out the jaboya trade. Essentially, when fishermen bring in their catch, they sell it to women, and then the women sell it to whoever. Only, fishermen often refuse to sell the fish for money alone. They want sex too. Nyanza Province, where Kisumu and Lake Victoria are located, has the highest AIDS rate in Kenya. The Peace Corps volunteer told me they have a project to help these women become proper businesswomen as a way to stamp out the jaboya trade. I replied that it seemed to me they already were businesswomen. The oldest business, even.


Kisumu Yacht Club






(I was assured that this area has hippos but no crocs, usually. They saw one croc a while ago but none before or after.)

Andrew and I sat down and talked about malaria and climate change for a long time. I'll transcribe our interview in the next diary. He was fascinating. You can see him speak here and there's actually a book chapter written about him and his work (Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It).

As we spoke, the club got more and more crowded. When I had asked him every single malaria-related question I could think of, I turned the audio recorder off and we just hung out. We joined a group of others, and they asked if he was going out on the lake today. But the water was rough, and no sane person was going out. In fact, the only person who did go out was a white man, an American who people suspect is actually a CIA agent. He loves rough water and always goes out when no one else will. Everyone else sat around, smoked, and drank.

An enormous black leather couch sat outside the club, and several people asked the staff "Is this where the big man sat?" Then they filled me in. The Prime Minister and President of Uganda ate their dinner here last night. And yes, they did sit on the couch.

After the interview, I wasn't quite sure what I was still doing there, although I had no other plans for the day and knew nobody in Kisumu, and the yacht club was truly lovely. Andrew asked if I'd like to stay for lunch so I agreed. Literally HOURS later, well past noon, close to what I'd call dinner time even, the group got started cooking lunch.

Most of the group was Indian, and I think Andrew was the only Kenyan and I was the only mzungu (white person). Andrew is Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, but a minority in Nyanza Province. Indians, which Kenyans call Asians, have been in the country for over a century, because the British brought them over to build a railroad and many of those who didn't die while building it stayed. Those who were successful in business in Kenya often brought their families over, so now Kenya has a decent sized Indian population and many Indian-owned businesses. Some have never even visited India!

The meal cooked was all meat - a beef dish and a chicken dish - and it was nothing that I recognized as Indian or Kenyan. It was well spiced and delicious, and by the time it was served I was so hungry, I didn't care that there wasn't a vegetarian option. Anyway, it really did taste good.

After a relaxing day of eating, drinking, and shooting the shit, it was time to go back to my hotel, where I would feel grateful as I took a hot shower and then simultaneously ran the fan while charging the computer.

Slums, AIDS, and barefoot, hungry orphans are one side of Kenya, but there's another side that lives in the world of the Kisumu Yacht Club. After such a nice day, I knew the rest of my week would be spent in a mud hut, definitely without running water, and perhaps without electricity. The week turned out to be the best week of the whole trip, but at that point I was really worried about it.

Because the friend I was staying with in Bondo warned me that they didn't have a lot of food around and suggested I buy some to bring with me, I asked Andrew to drop me off at the grocery store, and he did. From there, I took a motorbike home. It seems that Kenyan grocery stores sell two types of food and almost nothing in between. There are basic staples one uses for cooking - rice, beans, wheat, maize flour - and there are processed foods like chips, cookies, and bread made with "permitted class II preservative." I figured they'd have things like maize, fruits, and vegetables where I was going, and I didn't want chips and cookies.

I settled on the largest container of water I could carry, several mangoes and bananas, peanut butter, Kenyan acacia honey, preservative-free bread, organic Kenyan coffee, a few Cadbury chocolate bars, organic macadamia nuts, and some moringa, which I planned to bring home with me. (Moringa's a "superfood" that grows in Kenya, and it actually grows in Bondo, only I didn't know that when I bought it.) Somehow, I was able to carry all of this while riding the motorbike back to the hotel.