The Last Hunger Season by Roger Thurow

Author:Roger Thurow [Thurow, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781610393423
Publisher: PublicAffairs

FRANCIS WANJALA MAMATI was lost amid the towering maize stalks on his shamba. “Over here,” he shouted to his wife, Mary, who was coming to join him for a day of work in the field. Normally, Francis did the farming alone while Mary looked after the smaller children and the household chores. But this was a particularly busy time, the end of May, time for the third weeding and the second top-dressing with a bit of nitrogen-rich fertilizer.

It was as if Francis were standing in a thick forest of trees, so tall and lush was the maize. He, too, like Sanet, could hear strangers admire his crop as they walked on the path past his field. “No, this can’t be possible,” one said. In comparison to their neighbor’s patch, the maize of Francis and Mary and their eldest son, Geoffrey, who was also a One Acre member, did beggar the imagination. The neighbor’s maize looked anemic, scrawny, stunted; it was already turning yellow.

“You see the difference?” Francis pointed out to Mary as they began the weeding. “That’s how we were for so long. If One Acre could have been here many years back, we’d be much farther ahead.

Instead, it’s like we wasted our time. We could have chased hunger very far from our community and from Kenya.”

He had high hopes for a good harvest, maybe twenty bags of maize total from the two half-acre plots, but he still scoured the sky with worried eyes. The ideal weather conditions of May—plenty of sun with intermittent rain—needed to hold through June. Drought at the time when the maize tasseled would be disastrous. It had happened a few Junes back, so Francis remained vigilant and prayerful, particularly with the drought continuing its advance through other parts of Kenya. “If God can provide rain in moderate amounts, we will be happy,” he told Mary.

They had fortified themselves for a day in the field with a breakfast of tea and biscuits. So far, they were maintaining their energy during the wanjala. For lunch, to keep them going, they were expecting rice and potatoes. And for dinner, to recover their strength, ugali.

They didn’t have to skip many meals. Geoffrey, who was thirty and running his own business, was making sure of that.

Francis, who made it only to the fifth grade, had insisted that his children would get high school educations. Geoffrey had been a good pupil in primary school and had many offers to attend high school. But money was tight at home; his father had just left his government job and the farm wasn’t yielding much. Geoffrey dropped out of school for a year, but Francis told him not to despair, they would find a way. Together, they convinced a school to give him a spot and a little scholarship money, and Geoffrey became one of the top students. He graduated in 2001, when he was twenty. After school, he traveled to the big city of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast and began working with a friend in a textile business.

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