The Only Way out of Poverty in Africa: Part II

The Only Way out of Poverty in Africa: Part II

The big issue at Sister’s shamba is the construction of the fish farm. The water is there during the rainy season. All that is necessary to produce fish is building three terraced retention ponds at the back of the property which slopes gradually and then abruptly into a ravine which is dry during most of the year. The technology is already there. The first step is the removal of the eucalyptus trees on the slope. The second step is the digging out of the terraces and the construction of the walls that will retain the water in the ponds. This can be done with the mud from the slope and the wood from the eucalyptus trees. In one of the houses we visited, the husband had just closed up a doorway, exposing the construction of the wall, which was made of woven branches which provided the latticework that supported the mud. He was letting the mud dry before he applied the final coat. 

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The Only Way out of Poverty in Africa: Part I

The Only Way out of Poverty in Africa: Part I

Virtually every memory that Sister Jean has of her childhood is suffused with an awareness of her family’s grinding poverty.  Sister Jean was born in 1982 in a village called Lirembe in the western part of Kenya near Kakamega, the county seat, the second of seven children and her parents’ first female child. She was raised in a mud hut with a thatched roof. When insects ate away at the timbers that supported the roof in another house on the compound, her father built the current permanent house on their homestead. Her father worked for the Eveready Battery Company and then for the Pioneer Insurance company, but neither job paid him a wage that allowed him to provide for his family.  When I ask Sister what her first memory was, she replies, “we were really poor. I remember times when we lacked food.”  

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