Goat Skinning (credit: Matt Gruenburg)

Their hands acted almost independently, knowing just where to insert the knife and just how to break the joints, so the whole process was smooth, clean, and calm.

Lo and I were walking through the medina in Tangier, at the mouth of the Mediterranean on Morocco’s northern coast, when I saw a ring in one of the jeweler’s stores that was nearly big enough around for two of my fingers. What woman, I wondered, could possibly wear a ring that big? Haven’t you noticed the women’s hands here? Lo replied. It wasn’t until several days later, in Ain Chaib, that I understood.

The trip from Tangier to Ain Chaib, a village with just over 1,000 people in southern Morocco, consisted of an overnight train ride to Marrakech–a frantic city of stifling heat on the high plains–a five-hour bus ride farther southwest, up over the High Atlas Mountains to the coastal city of Agadir, and, finally, an hour riding in the back of a worn-out Mercedes Benz taxi, shoulder to shoulder with five other passengers headed home to villages and towns sprinkled along the highway.

We stayed with the same extended family, nearly 40 members across three generations, that Lo lived with during her service in the Peace Corps two years earlier. Family members cycled through the main house throughout the day, but for lunch and dinner everyone gathered.

Beyond taste and smell, every meal the family prepared was a tactile experience. Once one of the aunts or nieces placed the tagine, a conical clay dish used to cook many meals, in the middle of the table, another family member would take several rounds of hubz, a type of flat bread made by hand that morning by one of the women in the family, and tear them in half, and then in half again, giving everyone several rough quarters with which to scoop food. Tearing the hubz into perfect, bite-sized pieces with just my right hand, as even the youngest cousins were able to manage, required more dexterity than I was able to muster at first. Trying to gather tiny grains of couscous into a single, edible ball–again, with just one hand–proved even more difficult.

One morning, Elgada, the 70-year-old grandmother of the family, cracked Argan nuts to begin the process of making oil, which they use to add a smooth, nutty flavor to many dishes. Nearly blind from diabetes, Elgada sat on the ground, and with one stone balanced on her lap and a smaller one held in her right hand, she split open a nut she held pinched between her left index finger and thumb. Her calloused fingers then deftly separated the nut from the shell. As I sat in the shaded courtyard to avoid the heat, I watched her do this dozens of times without missing once. Years of doing this had given her the precision required to avoid smashing her fingers between two rocks.

Cracking Nuts (credit: Flickr user mgilbir)

The Sunday we were in the village, two of the brothers slaughtered and butchered a goat to make lunch and dinner for the family. Slaughtering a goat usually happens at the end of Ramadan, or for a birth or wedding, but I wanted to see it, to experience the ritual, so we helped the brothers pay for one. As they worked together to corral the goat, cut its neck, peel the skin back and remove the innards, there was little hesitation in any of their motions. Their hands acted almost independently, knowing just where to insert the knife and just how to break the joints, so the whole process was smooth, clean, and calm. In fact, the hands often seemed to lead the body, making quick work of a particularly odorous process and belying the grimaces on their faces.

Hands here made bread every morning, poured tea, slaughtered goats, peeled pricklypear fruits, all with an ease that could not come naturally to me. Some women in the village make jewelry, and those in other villages in the region weave carpets, or silversmith, all requiring dexterity and flexibility I can only admire.

In the two years since Lo had been in the village, the Internet has made its way to Ain Chaib. The family can now email a sister in Memphis without traveling to the nearby town, Ouled Teima, a 45-minute walk across an open, dry, dusty field. But the distance between the two communities won’t last. Ouled Teima is creeping toward Ain Chaib, extending a skeleton of development across the fields. A grid of roads, with a forest of solitary lamp posts at each corner, populates the otherwise barren landscape. In two more years, houses, families, markets, and taxi stands may fill the space.

Though the ring I marveled at in Tangier might fit the women in Ain Chaib, their fingers and palms large and muscled from years of  work, none of the women I met were wearing anything like it. Most will never go to Tangier. But Tangier is coming to them. And when it does, I wonder how their work, and their hands, will change.

Camels in Field (credit: Matt Gruenburg)

Wangari Maathai, Ellen Wilson, media in Kenya (credit: Jeff Haskins)

The Dr. Maathai-inspired Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign planted 4 billion trees as of yesterday. It started in 2007.

At a conference in Nairobi that focused on how more trees on farms could help reverse climate change, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai had a story to tell.

It was about a fire that broke out in a huge forest.

“All of the animals are coming out of the forest very disheartened,” she said. “They were saying, ‘Let me leave, as there is nothing we can do.’ They came to the edge of the forest—all except the hummingbird.

“The hummingbird said, ‘I’m not going anywhere. I want to do something about this fire.’ The hummingbird went to a spring and brought back a drop of water and put it on the fire. The bird kept going back and forth putting a drop of water on the fire. All of the other animals stayed on the edge of the forest—even those with larger beaks which could bring more water. They said, ‘What are you doing? You are too little. Come and join us.’ The hummingbird kept going.”

Maathai said that when it comes to growing trees on farms and reforesting in Kenya, every citizen has a role to play. For example, she said, farmers should “not wait for the government” to dig trenches to allow water to sink into the ground rather than run off and strip away the top soil. They should harvest rain water on their land, she said. People should plant trees from large canopied trees to small shrubs.

“Every one of us can be a hummingbird,” she said.

Graves (credit: Jeff Haskins)

Land is a complicated issue in Africa. It is one of the areas of African society where the colonial legacy still lives on. Rights claims to “ancestral homelands” often shift with the tides of political power. There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to who owns land, but the vagueness seems to clear up immediately when there is money to be made.

When you have land, you hold on to it.  This lesson was reinforced to me just a few weeks ago, while I was traveling with a few companions in Cameroon for a community site visit. Our vehicle had broken down about an hour outside of Yaoundé. It was just before 9:00 a.m. and since the weather was still cool, we decided to walk out of the forest and meet our pick-up vehicle along the way to our destination.

At the end of one road, we turned left.  The village center was hopping. Women walked to work or to fetch water. Older men sat under storefronts arguing, seemingly unaware of the three foreigners–an American, a French woman, and an Italian, covered in mud and sweat–walking out of the forest. Some teenagers hooted and hollered at us, perhaps trying to scare us.

The main street, though, had only a few storefronts.  One side featured a sign for a high-society-sounding “Americain Coiffure” barbershop nailed to a pole, but no barbershop was in sight.  On the other side, young men and women argued with motorbike taxis over fares to destinations farther down the road or maybe Yaoundé.

Americain Coiffure (credit: Jeff Haskins)

We walked farther. The road turned dusty. Many of the brick houses had large mounds in front, some covered by dirt, some by tile. It took me a few seconds to understand that these were graves. Some yards had two graves in front and one on the side. A large one designated adults who died, small ones were for children. We asked one of the scientists leading our group why people in the area buried the dead in front of their houses. “It’s a local custom,” he said. “So they can watch over the family.”

I wondered if there wasn’t more to it.

We approached a man carrying a machete and what looked like the trunk of an oil palm tree. In French, one of us asked, “Why do you bury dead here, in front of your house?”

He smiled. “So that they can watch over me and my family,” he said. “My father knows that he will be buried here, and he knows that he will watch over us and we will watch over him.”

But why hadn’t the village or a church set aside a plot of land for a cemetery?

“I’m not giving up my land for someone else’s family,” he said.

Perhaps that solved the mystery. Land was precious, and I thought to myself, it takes a village to raise a child, but you’re on your own when it comes to burying them.

Ostrich in Kenya (credit: Julian Mason, cc license)

At the start of the story-telling festival at L’Alliance Française, a cultural center in the heart of Nairobi, the host imposed a condition on the audience: we must promise to share the stories we hear.  “Deal?” he asked.  “Deal” we answered. “Sawa sawa,” he said, and the storytelling began, the first from Kenya.

The storyteller was a tall anglo woman, her British accent rounded with African inflections.  She had a neck like a Maasai, long and regal, and cropped white hair.  She began, and she was the hunter.  Three drummers and a flautist seated on the stage articulated the story with beats, rattles, and high flowing notes:

This hunter held a spear as he searched the savannah for an ostrich.  The ostrich he found did not run, but rose, leaving him a single egg, which he wrapped in a blanket and took home.  He placed it in a pot, whose bottom was lined with a thin layer of fat.  The egg grew in size, the fat disappeared, the man added more fat, the egg grew larger.  The hunter transferred it to another pot, and the egg grew until one day it cracked, and from it emerged a baby girl.

The man and his wife were childless and they raised the girl.  She became the hunter’s pride and joy.  The girl could run almost as fast as a cheetah, and dance graceful intricate dances, and leap like a leopard.  So enamored was the father of his daughter that he ordered his wife to let the girl do as she liked.  Left to her own devices, the hunter believed his daughter would find a path to greatness.  The wife could get no help from their daughter -no help to gather firewood or water, to plant and weed and harvest the crops, or cook the food.  And the woman realized that her husband loved their daughter, more than he loved her.

The storyteller addressed the audience: “What does a woman feel like,” she asked, “when she thinks her husband loves someone else more than he loves her?” The man sitting next to me answered “She feels smashed.”  “She feels like smacking herself,” someone else in the audience offered.  The storyteller continued:

Year after year, jealousy grew in the wife’s chest.  It grew from a small dark seed, until it consumed her being.  Then, one day as she was cooking porridge, the wife found that the porridge was hardening in the pot.  She needed water.  She could not leave the pot for the porridge would spoil.  And so she called her daughter to go and fetch some water:

Now, the storyteller became the daughter and the lead drummer became the mother.  They spoke in the local language. The mother/drummer called for help.  The daughter/storyteller turned her back and admired her fingernails.  The mother demanded help. The daughter scoffed.

“You are nothing but an egg,” the drummer/mother yelled. (The man sitting next to me translated.) “What, me, an egg?”  “You are an egg, an ostrich egg, deserted in the grass!” The mother/drummer bellowed.

The girl could not stand to hear those words, she tore out of the house.  The hunter saw her run, and at once knew what had happened.  He pursued his daughter, across the savannah, past the trees dotting the grassland, toward the river.  He had almost reached her, when she jumped into the river and began to swim, stroke after stroke, across the river.  He wanted to pursue her, but something stayed him.  He froze there on the river bank.  As she emerged on the other side, her legs, her strong and beautiful legs, were changing, the thighs thickening.  Her neck, her long and elegant neck, grew longer still, her head grew smaller, and feathers sprouted from her chest and back, until, she stood there, an ostrich.  The ostrich turned and looked at the hunter.  For one moment, their eyes locked.  And then she turned and galloped across the savannah, almost as fleet as a cheetah, never to be seen again.

The audience was silent.  The school girls in their green sweaters and black skirts, the ex-pats and their children, the orphans from a nearby home, and the story-tellers in queue, preparing to speak.

Wangari Maathai, 20 years ago (credit: Ellen Wilson)

“The earth was naked. For me, the mission was to try to cover it with green.”– Wangari Maathai

It is a day like any other, running around Washington, D.C., in a Honda Odyssey, taking children through their errands. This is the suburban life in the US: there’s a birthday party and a gift that needs to be bought. We drive to the toy store to get a Batman action figure for Tristram, and I hope my 6-year-old will not scream and cry about not having any of his own money left to get a toy. In the window, I glimpse a book that immediately takes me back years, to my days of trekking in the uplands north of Nairobi and down into the Rift Valley with four Green Belt Movement members. We went village to village to speak to women about planting trees across their treeless lands.

In Wangari’s Trees of Peace, this woman of inspiration and the movement she created has been memorialized in the form of a children’s book. It is a strange vision, and I wonder how an oversimplified story about Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai has been crafted to be sold to children who are also being sold plastic Legos and Playmobil sets and computer games and books on Star Wars and race cars and Barbie and Groovy Girls and Calico Critters.

Book Cover

I buy the book to read it to my children. I buy it for myself as well. Its last lines say,

“And if you were to climb to the very top of Mount Kenya today, you would see the millions of trees growing below you, and the green Wangari brought back to Africa.”

I saw those green trees. We traveled by public taxi minibuses called matatus and walked for miles and miles on foot, probably stopping in many villages. In every village, we were greeted by women singing and dancing. In every village, Lilian Njehu, an early leader of the movement, spoke to the women for hours and hours about their trees. Sitting on bare benches in the sun under scarce trees for shade, she helped them tend to their trees, speaking in Kikuyu. We saw thousands of seedlings grown in rows in each place and others that had grown to be mature trees—trees for firewood, windbreaks, food, and medicine.

I read the book to my sons that night. They listened intently. When we were through, they asked why Wangari was arrested for trying to protect a park in the middle of Nairobi, for stirring up conflict by training women all across the land to plant trees. “Was she really in jail?” they asked. A few days later, I helped my youngest son plant a bean seedling he had nourished from a seed to life in our kitchen window.  He felt the dirt around the roots, the coolness of the soil in his hands, the feeling of laying to bed a green thing that will grow tall out of dirt—something that will produce the nurturing sustenance of life. It brought me back years again, and I understood anew how millions of nurturing women’s hands in Kenya, and in other countries, brought life out of the land and how their joy and their singing could bring life and peace back to the land.

Bean Seedling (credit: Ellen Wilson)

Kenya Cows (credit: Dominic Chavez)

NAIROBI – The pace of life here is as it always has been–lots of traffic jams, crowded downtown sidewalks, tens of thousands of people selling things by the roadside. Tourists also have returned in high numbers this summer. It is easy to forget that just seven months ago the waves of post-election violence raised serious questions about the country’s future.

But the impacts linger, just out of view. This morning, I was interviewing Machira Gichohi, managing director of the Kenya Dairy Board, and he brought up how the violence affected the dairy industry.

Much of the violence, he noted, was concentrated in the Rift Valley, which produces roughly half of the country’s milk. During the month-long upheaval, “farmers’ animals were stolen, infrastructure was destroyed, and people just scattered.”

In December 2007, just before the violent outbreak, the country was producing 1.2 million liters of milk per day. But during the violence–January and February–output dropped by half, to 600,000 liters per day. Now, Gichohi said, it had rebounded to 850,000 liters daily.

It is the cold season here, and dairy cows are producing less milk than during warmer times. So it seemed that the dairy industry was making a fairly swift rebound, and that in a few months it was conceivable to approach the pre-violence numbers.

But Gichohi said it wouldn’t be so easy.

“It will take us one to two years to get back to where it was,” he said. “As our prime minister said in London, ‘Kenyans have gone to hell and we don’t want to go back.’ That’s how we feel. We hope those crazy days don’t come back.”

Mariam Yussif (credit: John Donnelly)

ACCRA, Ghana – Over the last decade, support groups for HIV-positive people have flourished around Africa. The best of these groups offer so much: a safe place to talk about the range of issues they face; endless empathy; even connections that can lead to jobs. But rarely have I seen such a need for a group as during a recent visit here, with the Yaddah Dah Allah Muslim Women Association, whose members are HIV positive.

The 35 women share a secret — their HIV status — almost entirely just among themselves. Husbands don’t know. Families haven’t heard. Friends haven’t been told. The reason is simple: Many fear that if they revealed their status, husbands and members of the extended family would kick them out of their homes or worse — even though in almost all cases husbands infected them.

“In the Muslim community, we don’t want to disclose our status to each other,” said Mariam Yussif, the founder of the group. “People would rather kill themselves than bring it out.”

So their escape valve opens only when they meet — the third Thursday of every month. Mariam leads them. She has had a tragic past — her husband and three of her five children have died from AIDS-related causes, she said.

And yet, on a visit recently with a small group of African health journalists attending a Kaiser Family Foundation-sponsored workshop in Accra, Mariam didn’t evoke feelings of sympathy. Instead, we were dazzled by her — she spoke freely and expressed herself with heartfelt precision.

“If we could get the Muslim community to talk about HIV, it would start to do away with the stigma,” she said, standing in front on about a dozen support group members. “Many men have more than two wives, so if he gets infected, it means everyone is infected. And if a Muslim woman is infected in Ghana, she is a prisoner.”

When Mariam finished, Penny Duckham, who is charge of the Kaiser Media Fellowship programs, whispered to me, “She’s a rock star.” Penny was right — Mariam was such an effective speaker that she had the ability to move audiences, and by doing so could greatly help women like herself.

And yet, there wasn’t much else uplifting from our visit. Several Muslim women spoke to us about the troubles in their lives.

“It was so difficult for me to be living with this disease. I need to talk to someone about it, but that wasn’t possible,” said one woman. “So it was such a great joy that I found this group.”

I asked them if they were able to express anger toward their husbands in the group setting. The women all shook their heads. No, they said.

“When we meet, we don’t talk about any anger toward our husbands,” said one. “Instead, we draw strength from each other.”

Rice field (credit: Jeff Haskins)

About an hour drive from Kampala, in a place called Namulonge, you’ll find Hadji Wanonda, a Ugandan farmer, who grows locally adapted and resilient varieties of rice on his one-acre plot of land.

For years, Hadji planted cassava, maize and a few other crops for his family to eat. Now with improved rice varieties provided to him by local agricultural research institute, Hadji can make up to US$800 in a three month period selling his harvest in the local markets. This represents a massive increase in income for him and, more recently, Hadji has been able to employ men and women in his community to help out with farm work.

Hadji’s story is part of a larger effort to boost African rice production and ensure self-sufficiency for the sake of Africa’s food security. The demand for rice in sub-Saharan Africa is double the rate of population growth; consumption is growing faster than that of any other major food staple. But instead of finding ways to substantially increase local production, countries have depended on more costly imports.

Hadji uses rice varieties called “Nerica,” a resilient, high-yielding cross of African and Asian rice. Breeders of Nerica rice won the World Food Prize in 2004. Nerica is not restricted to growing in paddies, thus enabling African farmers to grow rice in places that no one before thought possible with no irrigation. If this kind of public research and development could be applied more widely, Africa could be more self-sufficient and depend a little less on others for its food supply.

Rosa, Before (credit: Dominic Chavez)

I have traveled around the developing world since I was barely out of my teens. I’ve been in more places forgotten than remembered. But people often stay with me. Rosa does.

I met her last fall in a rundown quarter of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She was 16, with black unruly hair that ran in all directions, and she wore a pout –- partly because a man I was writing about was telling her how disappointed she had made him. The man, Nasir al-Amin, had been spending his vacations for the past five years helping put children through school in Addis. I am in the process of writing a book on how Americans are trying to help children in Africa, and Nasir is a key person in the book.

For Nasir, Rosa was special. He had known her for four years. She had lost both her parents to AIDS. And Nasir was putting Rosa through school, along with 57 other Ethiopian kids. But the other 57 were doing well in school; Rosa was not. She had dropped out of a photography school, and for two days last fall Nasir tried to get her back on track.

Rosa had health problems — an irregular heart beat, and depression, it seemed — and Nasir gave her money to see a doctor and enroll in school. But after seeing her in late September, Rosa never showed for a meeting to give him receipts and a report on how it went. For several months afterward, Nasir thought all was lost. He sent out emissaries to find her, but he heard nothing. Nasir feared she had turned to sex work.

Six months later, I returned to Addis, and went looking for Rosa.

I called a social worker to ask for help. He said he would call around. A few days later, I showed up at his office. An acquaintance of his had found Rosa’s phone number, and had talked to her. Even better, she had agreed to meet me in a few days. But I didn’t have a few days –- I had to meet her that morning. I was flying back to Washington the next day. The social worker said he couldn’t help me right away. I pressed him. He left to speak with his boss; he received permission to go with me.

Rosa had moved to a nearby slum. But when we arrived, she wasn’t there. The social worker called her, and she promised to come immediately. Five minutes passed, and then she called out our names. We rounded a corner, and there was Rosa, older somehow, her hair shorn, bigger, much bigger. I approached and it was obvious: Rosa was pregnant.

She took us to her sister’s house — her sister was a waif, Rosa 20 days from delivery. Her stories poured out. Just the day after we had seen her in the fall, a doctor told her she was pregnant. A day later, her uncle had beat her for going out with boys, beat her so bad that her blood ran down her back and chest. Then the uncle took scissors to her beautiful hair and cut huge clumps indiscriminately. Rosa retreated to her room, and shaved her head. The next morning, her uncle kicked her out of the house with nothing. Rosa moved in with her boyfriend’s family’s home, where she remained still. But her problems hadn’t ended. Her heart was giving her trouble –- racing one minute, causing her to gulp for air another. Two doctors had told her in the past few days that she was in grave danger now, that giving birth put her and her baby at risk.

I sat across from her, wondering what would become of her. She would have a baby in days. She would be caring for her baby, she wouldn’t be going to school. Sixteen-year-old Rosa was a memory. I went looking for her, but she was lost.

Farmer and children (credit: Bee Wuethrich)

It is the rainy season, and there is no rain. We take the road toward Monkey Bay, and pass a pick-up truck, people wave wildly. The driver stops the car; it is Justice and Eddie who have jumped out of the pick-up, and who run toward us. “Forgive me if I am tired today,” Justice says as he settles into the back seat. “I returned this morning at 3:00 a.m. from a funeral in my home village.” His cousin’s daughter, four years old, dead of malaria.

We drive. Through Mangochi, past the Hotchkiss gun, across the Shire River bridge, and wind up the hills west of Lake Malawi, long and dusty. Dustier still the dirt road that branches off, abandoning thoughts of trade with Mozambique to cross a plateau crisp with brown dry leaves and shriveled ears of maize.

It is nearing harvest time, the hungry season, when last year’s stores of food are running out, cash is short, and it is not yet time to bring in the harvest. It is like being on an ocean with nothing to drink, these endless fields of drought-plagued maize.

According to recent newspaper reports, people are beginning to eat seed processed for planting—fumigated with chemicals to protect it from insects. And they are selling the fertilizer purchased with vouchers to raise cash to buy food.

“I bought my mother a sack of maize for 2000 kwacha,” a man tells me. “It is a 100 percent increase in price.”

Then, look at this. The farmer leads us through his village, over rutted roads. Green in an ocean of brown whispering leaves. We see a field of maize taller and greener than the rest. An abundance of big cobs jutting off of each strong stalk. The farmer has planted a different seed than his neighbors, an improved drought resistant variety. He sells the seed in his village store to farmers who travel miles on foot or bicycle. Most farmers purchase it with vouchers issued by the government. It is known as “Champale” or poundable, the hard outer kernel lends itself to be ground into maize flour, and its yield is 30 percent higher than the local variety. As the farmer shows off his field, his family gathers, many of his 14 sons and daughters. They are smiling, his wife give us a thumbs up.

Demonstration plot (credit: Bee Wuethrich)

The seed farm that grows this improved seed sold 50,000 packets this past year—enough to feed an additional 150,000 people. They sold it through a network of 29 agro-dealers, spread out across a region that encompasses one million people.

One of those agro-dealers used his income to buy a car, so that he could distribute the seed to another three outlets. The route took him half a day and covered some 30 kilometers. Before the start of the growing season, he sold 2,000 sacks of seed.

“I know the people,” he says. “This area is where my home is. I want to assist. That is why I spend my money on fuel. In other areas there is drought. But in my area, because the farmers got the seeds early, they are going to survive.”

For now, success in Malawi’s green revolution is measured in survival.

Editor’s Note: This story was reported in March 2008.