Reflecting on the past week whilst in church today.

As is my usual practice when in Nairobi on a Sunday, today I went to church at Nairobi Baptist. In my naivety it hadn't clicked with me ahead of time that it would be anything other than a standard Sunday. But boy was I wrong. Such a powerful service today, to be in church with Kenyans at the end of this tumultuous week. A week when young people have stood up and said to government that enough is enough in a very loud and powerful way, when Parliament has been stormed, when unrest has taken place all over the country, when tear gas and bullets have been used on the protestors and when young people have been shot dead by the police whilst taking part in the protests.

A week when memories will have been triggered of previous riots related to the politics in Kenya, and individuals who suffered trauma at those times may well have had those traumatic memories triggered again.

One of the most powerful moments in the service was when all of the GenZ and millennials in the church were invited to the front of the church. There were at least 150 of them - all members of the age group who have been leading on the protests.

I don’t know how many actually took part in the protests but there’s a high chance that many did. All of them will have been involved in the conversations in some way, and are concerned about their future in this nation. That's why they are protesting.

Once at the front, the older members of the church were invited to go and pray for the young people. It was an incredible moment - the generations coming together, the old lifting up the young. Just like in the Bible when Moses lifted up his arms to pray blessings over Joshua who was leading the army on the battle field.

The message throughout was not one of inciting more violence, but it was also not one of telling the young people to stop being involved. It was one of prayer. To keep Gods justice and wisdom at the heart of the actions that they are doing. To stay faithful to God, to keep looking to Him as they make their decisions on what to do. To keep centring on God, as they seek to do the right thing.

I went down to the front and prayed with some of the young people. We shed tears together and it felt right to be demonstrating that their fight is not being ignored by the rest of the world, but that prayers are being said for them from beyond national boundaries.

At that stage in the service, the focus was very much on supporting and praying for the GenZ's and Millennials of the church, but during the service, it was clear that this is definitely not just a GenZ issue.

Yes they are leading, but the older generations are right behind them. Depending on their age, they will have their own memories of previous election and government related riots in the past. Some of the actions this week will have triggered those memories to surface again.

The teenagers are too young to be actively involved but they are very aware of what is going on, and the implications that it can have for them in their future.

The children know something is going on. They might not understand the issues, but they do know that they were sent home from school early to avoid them getting caught up in the troubles so they definitely know something bad is happening.

Lord I pray for Kenya. 

 

For the GenZ and millennials who are so angry and frustrated and lacking hope for their future - May they stay safe and know wisdom in what actions to take. 

 

For older Kenyans who are having to relive past painful and traumatic experiences related to election riots and the like - May they know peace and comfort. 

 

For younger Kenyans who are looking on and wondering what the future is for them - May they have hope. 

 

For the President and the government who have the power to move the situation forward - May they have the courage to make the right actions, and to represent their people well. 

 

Lord I pray for Kenya. 

 

 

Permaculture part 2 – the school bit

As mentioned in the earlier blog post, I’ve been in Kilifi county, visiting a project run by Norbert and Asilomar foundation. Kilifi is in eastern Kenya, right on the Indian ocean, and Asilomar is Swahili for ‘refuge by the sea’ – perfect name!

Norbert’s focus is introducing the concept of permaculture as a means of achieving some level of food security for the community in which he lives. This community have lost their previous and traditional livelihood of fishing due to commercial fishing trawlers squeezing them out, and the result is a community which has lost its identity. It is also a community with very little knowledge of farming and agriculture which is proving to be a massive disadvantage with regard to trying to put food on the table.

As well as setting up his own demonstration gardens, Norbert and his permaculture buddy Lennox have spent the past few months setting up a permaculture training programme in the nearby secondary school. I had the opportunity to go and visit it this week and meet some of the students.

Just over the back from Norbert’s home is a secondary school which has about 27 acres of land. Some of this is used for the school campus (it’s a boarding school) and games fields, but a lot of it stands idle. When Norbert approached them to ask about setting up the permaculture project, they were very keen to engage, and the project has gone really well.

In April, 40 or so students took part in a 3-day permaculture training program which introduced them to all the basics and provided some practical opportunities to put the lessons into practice in the Asilomar demo plots. Around the same time, a plot at the school was being cleared of rocks and ploughed by local labour so that it was ready for planting. Apparently if the students had been asked to complete this task it might never have happened!

In May, the first seeds and seedlings were planted. In one half of the plot, the students planted loads of rows of cowpeas (a type of legume which they eat as greens rather than waiting for the peas). In the other half of the plot, the students planted a mix of fruit trees, grasses, vegetables (tomatoes, carrots, kale). When I visited, just 7 weeks after that initial sowing, the students had already harvested their first crop of cowpeas and sold them by the handful to teachers and community members. In so doing they made 6,200 KSh (about £38), of which they’ve used 5,000 to buy a new hose to assist with more efficient watering of the crops. The second crop of cowpeas was growing well, and the other crops were also at various stages of harvesting. Every day some of them go down to the plot and water the crops, and keep on top of the weeding. They are all so dedicated, and there's already talk of starting a second plot.

I was so impressed! So much achieved in such a short time and the students were so positive about their new knowledge and skills. Some of the boarding students were saying how they are going to introduce their parents to the new farming techniques when they go home for the holidays. Some of the day students were equally saying how they want to put the techniques into practice at their homes. In reality this will probably also be in school breaks as their term-time week consists of being in school from 6am – 6pm Monday – Saturday, and then they have homework to do after that. So not a lot of time during termtime for anything else.

For some of the students, the opportunity to put the techniques into practice seems less accessible. Some of them were saying how they don’t have land at their home that they can use, nor do they have a garden anywhere else. NB some of the families who don’t have land around their home rent small plots of land elsewhere so that they can grow their own crops – this clearly isn’t the case for all of the students. Other students do have some land around their homes, but it is so rocky that growing crops isn’t viable. As a result of the experiences of those students, Norbert and Lennox have ensured that some training includes learning options on how to do container gardening. The container might be tyres, or those big water cooler containers, or old sacks. And sometimes the containers are on the ground, other times they are on the roof. But it’s good to see that they are catering for those from all socio-economic situations.

An off-shoot that is organically developing from this programme are the conversations that Norbert and Lennox have been able to have with students on a one-on-one basis – it’s almost as though informal mentoring has started to appear. Chatting with Norbert about this he is certainly recognising that there is a need to explore this side of things more and maybe include it in a more intentional way in future projects. Will wait and see what comes on that front.

It's been a real joy to see the work of Norbert and Asilomar. He is certainly starting to create inroads into the community with regards to potential for much better food security, and I’m looking forward to returning in months to come – to see how it has all progressed more, and to ensure the refuge by the sea!

 

Protests in Kenya

 

Some of you might have seen in the news about the protests taking place in Kenya at the moment. Not surprisingly it’s been a key topic of conversation with those that I am spending time with here and I thought I’d share just a few reflections to add an extra perspective to what you might be reading. 

The protests are being called the GenZ protests as it is members of that generation who are really taking the lead in it all and who were the initiators of these protests. Certainly there are GenX and millennial supporters as well, but GenZ are the dominant demographic amongst those who are doing the protesting. 

The main topic that they are protesting about is the new finance bill that is going before Parliament and the effect that it will have on regular people. President Ruto was elected on promises of improving the financial situation for the lower classes in Kenya, but the bill going through will not do that. And that’s what the protests are about. 

Already some aspects of the bill have been put into effect, and it is hitting hard.

VAT, one of the main sources of tax in a country where many people earn money by informal means and so don’t pay salary-related tax, has gone up from 8% to 16%. 

The cost of fuel has risen from 150 ksh to 190 ksh per litre (roughly up from 95p to £1.20). The ripple effects of that hits not just those who can afford to own a vehicle but everyone who uses public transport to get around, or who wants to buy food and or anything else that is transported anywhere. Also anything that is linked to a factory which requires fuel to make it work. Prices of all commodities are rocketing everywhere. 

So, for example, a bag of sugar has gone up from 250 ksh to 360 ksh (via a brief time at 490 ksh). That’s from £1.50 to £2.20 or so. Other food items are going up at equally steep rates.

With so many people on such low wages (average wage here is £112 per month) it’s not surprising that frustrations are being vented. 

People can’t afford to start businesses, or income generating activities, or go to university anymore. The young adults are feeling like they are being hit very hard, and their prospects for the future are being impacted. 

I'm told that when this financial act was being devised, the government set up a load of public forums to allow the voice of the people to be included in the conversation. People felt that they were being consulted. The outcome was that 95% of those involved said that the Bill would not work, that it would result in more harm to regular people than it would help them. But did the government listen? It appears not, and that’s another reason why the protestors are on the march. They’ve given up with trusting the government and doing things democratically it seems. 

This is a lot of the stuff that’s being talked about just now. The demand for the government to totally cancel the bill, and to start again, but with members of the public being properly involved in the conversation. Not a token nod, but properly involved. Will it happen? Who knows?

What isn’t being talked about so much is the backdrop of national debt that has pushed Kenya to this point. Over the years Kenya, like so many other countries in the global south, has been given various loans by World Bank, national governments and institutions of the global north. The loans were for development and to help nations try and compete in an increasingly captialist and globalised world. The interest rates that were attached to those loans were outrageously high. As a result, Kenya, and all the other nations equally affected, have been locked in to paying back huge amounts of money to the lenders, to the detriment of the development of their own infrastructure. These countries have fully paid back many of the actual loans themselves but still they are having to service the interest payments, and will continue to have to do so for years to come. This is part of why they are in such a dire financial situation. Yes there has been misuse of funds along the way, but the obscene interest levels are a huge problem. And it’s the average Joe and Josephine who are paying the price. 

This injustice is not being included in the media coverage. It’s also not being mentioned that the interest rate for loans to other global north countries is way lower than the interest rates for global south countries. How is that ok? 

What is the way forward? Clearly president Ruto and his government can’t assume that things will settle down. GenZ are educated in politics in a way that previous generations weren’t. They are utilising social media to mobilise support in a way that hasn’t been done before. 

This is a protest that is beyond ethnicity, beyond class, beyond educational level, beyond city boundaries. This is a protest that is being supported by the wider Kenyan diaspora and is being watched by GenZ’s from many other nations who are also suffering the same financial injustices. 

Apparently one option for the government is to not get round to sorting any changes to the Bill for 21days because it will default become law after that. I really hope that they don’t choose that route - I get the sense that if they do then the protests that have been seen so far will be minor compared to what  might come. 

Could they just default on the loans? And if they do, and they get away with it - what about all the other nations that are equally struggling? Could there be a ripple effect of defaulting - and what would that amount to in practical terms?

I have no idea what will happen, there are various rumours but no one really knows. I just hope that what does come includes positive, respectful and meaningful interaction with those who are calling for change. And I really hope that those in the global north who have the ability to cancel the debts, and release these countries from the unjust situations in which they find themselves. take the brave step of cancelling those debts, and showing an act of justice at this time.

Prayers for Kenya, and for the other countries who are watching and wondering and waiting.

Permaculture by the Indian Ocean

 

In December last year, I visited a new-to-me project that is situated in Kilifi county, Kenya. Kilifi is the next county up from Mombasa, and as one who loves to swim in the sea whenever she has the opportunity, I was delighted to have the excuse to go to the Indian Ocean in order to visit this project!

My visit in December coincided with unprecedented flooding in the area, and so getting to the project was much more complicated and time-consuming than planned, resulting in only a relatively brief visit. But still it was very good and I was keen to get back and see progress.

This past week I have been able to achieve that, and what wonderful progress I’ve seen! Let me share some of this with you.

The project is run under the name of the Asilomar foundation – a small non-profit enterprise set up by Norbert Chumu when he returned to Kenya a couple of years ago after serving the church in UK for several years. He and his wife had land in a small village in Kilifi county. The village bordered the ocean, and most of the inhabitants had grown up with livelihoods based around fishing. But recently that livelihood has all but gone, due to big fishing companies taking all the stock and leaving nothing for the little guys. Norbert was very aware that the community was struggling to move forwards. They had no knowledge of farming, and no scientific understanding of climate change and its impact on agriculture, even if they were aware that the weather was increasingly unreliable.

So, when Norbert and Mercy returned home the plan was to set up a demonstration permaculture project. In so doing, they would provide a space for local people to come to learn more about how to do small-scale gardening and crop cultivation in a context that matched their own, rather than trying to learn from practitioners who were living in a different environment. Unbeknownst to Norbert, 5 miles down the road there was another permaculture practitioner – Lennox – who has turned out to be a wonderful source of knowledge, and together Lennox and Norbert are proving to be quite the team!

For those of you who don’t know what permaculture is, by the way, it’s a system of food production and land management that seeks to mimic arrangements seen in flourishing natural ecosystems. So the combinations of crops, the avoidance of over-intensification, the ways in which different crops support each other etc. It ties in with some types of cottage gardening and allotment growing that we see in the UK.

Back in December, things had just got going for Norbert, and his first demo garden was getting underway. This time round, it was great to see so much progress. They are using a 3-row repating pattern of growing, so the first row is trees, the second is veg and the third is grass, then back to trees. The trees include fruit – guava, banana, papaya, moringo etc; and timber trees, and there are quick growing leafy veg growing underneath – cowpeas, spinach etc. The veg include onions, tomatoes (both staple ingredients) and carrots, and in future there will be beans and possibly maize as well. And the grass is grown to provide mulch for the soil and so prevent loss of water.

The harvests come at an alarming rate – on average Norbert reckons he can have a continuous crop of tomatoes and onions throughout the year, and similar for the greens. Not like our one crop of tomatoes per year: I was very envious!!

The water comes from a well which, due to close proximity to the sea is a bit saline, and affects the taste of the crops. So Norbert is going to dilute it with rainwater which he is capturing off the house and storing in a large underground tank. He then plans to use a solar pump to pump the water to a tank high enough to give the pressure needed for watering.

Some of the crops are grown in sacks and tyres, as it is recognised that not all of the locals have access to land, and even if they do it isn’t always viable land for growing crops. So Norbert is also demonstrating how they can grow crops, and not feel excluded by virtue of their living conditions.

It was so inspirational to see what Norbert is getting up to. The progress made is phenomenal, especially considering that he is also running a permaculture project in a local school – but more about that in a subsequent blog. My visit was a great reminder of just what can be achieved when we work in harmony with mother nature, rather than trying to go our own way.