First Sentence

"My first inspiration for this book came from meeting a group of women in Kenya. “Mama” Benedetta Ndolo leads a village women’s group in the Iveti hills of Machakos district. From the top of the hill in her village you can see for miles to the northwest, over the dusty countryside stretching towards Somalia. She and her friends taught me what is probably the main lesson this book can offer: whatever land you have, take care of it. For a whole afternoon Mama Ndolo took me all around her village, showing off her group’s various accomplishments. We toured the hill-slopes terraced by village work-parties. We 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, lighting the wisps of cloud overhead. 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 started planting tree nurseries of mango, eucalyptus, and other seedlings. Years before, at the UN Conference on Desertification in Nairobi, several African governments had proposed planting two great belts of forest, one across North Africa and the other south of the expanding Sahara. After the conference, most governments did little about it. Perhaps they were under pressure to cut spending and pay on their loans. In Kenya the government advocated tree planting, but it was the village women who were most concerned to save the land beneath their feet. Nobody paid these women, or counted the cost of their reforestation efforts. The trees were their 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 full of confidence, as if sure that Mama Ndolo’s women are here, and this place will never become desert."