My African symbol of hopes and dreams

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The women of Mwariki Village in Kenya ready with trees to be planted by Canadian visitors. (SUBMITTED PHOTOS)

LAKE NAKURU, KENYA -- Isak Dinesen had a farm in Africa. I have a tree.

The Danish writer's farm sat at the base of Kenya's Ngong Hills, a seductively beautiful site in the country's Great Rift Valley. Her colonial Africa is long gone. In its place grew mass tourism and luxury hotels coexisting with bitter poverty and struggle.

But there's hope, as there is whenever resilient people gather their meagre resources and inch forward. The women of this country, grassroots feminists who fight for their survival and that of their families, are leading the charge. Their community-based organizations offer a chance to earn a living, to educate their children and to ameliorate some challenges.

Nakuru, with three million residents, is Kenya's fifth-largest city. But when you leave the busy streets of the city and travel down roads that are a collection of jouncing ruts, you begin to see the real Africa. Baboons fight each other in the bushes, their shrieking deafening. Impalas explode across the thin grass.

Many people live in muds huts and shelters with rough galvanized-tin roofs. There is suffering here and there is pride. This is the part of Africa you must see to understand even a little of the continent's challenges.

I planted my tree with Beth Wacera, the young community co-ordinator at Lake Nakuru Lodge. The lodge is a luxury hotel with a deep social conscience. Lodge owner Joseph Muya, a wealthy man with a string of prize race horses, wants to help his fellow Kenyans.

"They are able to send their children to school," he said of the women who participate in the micro-industries he began. "They are able do a lot people should be able to do," he said.

"We tell them to provide the chickens (to the lodge's kitchens), we buy organic vegetables, fruits, bananas."

Muya said these women are the future of Kenya.

"Instead of sponsoring one or two children and leaving the rest in the village, they can all go. Education will make a difference."

There are two main enterprises under Beth Wacera's direction. Black Rhino provides women with financial assistance to begin fish, dairy or chicken farming, to raise goats or to keep bees and pigs. Mwariki Heart To Heart Women Group uses tourism as tool to eliminate poverty. Visitors are offered the chance to spend $20 to plant a tree and have a memorial plaque painted. This isn't the benevolent bwana approach to charity, it's an exchange of items of value.

When refugees from tribal wars came to the Lake Nakuru area in 2007 and 2008, they were offered shelter and some food.

"Instead of continuing with handouts," said Wacera, "we came up with the idea of a campsite. Two hundred families had mud houses. But we wanted to empower the women."

Some of the women now garden and supply the lodge with produce. Others make paper into jewelry or knit stuffed animals for profit. Some of their works sell in curio shops or other tourist hotels. When tree-planters arrive, they inevitably buy from the women.

"We were tired of giving out cash," said Wacera of the micro-business approach. "We teach them to budget, go with them to purchase material, buy chicks, whatever they need."

The women join the collective and borrow startup money. They are expected to pay it back at one per cent interest. At the end of the year they take a small profit.

Our group meets the women of Mwariki one afternoon. They sing a welcome song and insist we sing them a song if we ever return. There's easy laughter and the admiration of chubby babies. The women describe the works of the collective and what it has meant to them. Rough tables are filled with stuffed animals the women make by shearing their sheep and spinning the wool. Tables are heaped with paper jewelry. Six Canadian women shop furiously.

The women tell us they're saving to buy a new spinning wheel. They need 7,000 Kenya shillings, roughly $100. We pass the hat at dinner that night, each of us deeply moved by the women and their work, stunned with the relative ease of our lives.

We arrive at dawn the next morning to plant. The sun is already hot when a villager comes out with a pickax to break the hard ground. She does most of the work. Women line up with plants to drop into the holes. One carries a bucket of water to give the first drink. I smooth the dirt over my seedling, say a prayer for a late friend and cry some. Tears are always close to the surface in this place of contrasts.

We go into their shelter and give them our shilling. One Canadian gives a speech. There are hugs and more tears. Women swap addresses, take pictures and hug deeply.

We offer our song of celebration.

"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine," we happily sing, "You make me happy when skies are grey."

I have a tree in Africa. It will feed my spirit and my memories as it helps African women fulfill their own hard-fought destinies.

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 28, 2012 A8