Under The Vine and Fig Tree

Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid . . .

                                                                                                                     Micah 4:4

Last week I went down to the village in Murang'a where our Pilot group meets, even though we didn't have a meeting scheduled for that day. The road to the village rambles through a hilly countryside along the Sagana river, with small farms crammed  with tobacco and vegetables crowding the river banks on one side of the road, and dry scrub land rising up into dusty hills on the other. And then the road suddenly spills out onto a broad plain. This too was once as dry and dusty as the surrounding hills, but the community irrigation project has turned the dry lands into a vast flood-filled plain separated into countless small rice-paddies. And a good number of those paddies belong to members of our group. The electric green of the rice creates a stark contrast with the brown shabbiness that covers most of Kenya just before the October rains, and amidst the green you can see spots of orange, purple, red . . . farmers in imported American t-shirts and traditional congas hard at work in the fields, as they have been since early morning and will be till after the sun sets. On clear days you can see Mt. Kenya rising up some 14,000 feet above the village, but on Tuesday it was totally hidden behind hot hazy clouds.


Mzee Gabriel

I went to Murang'a to learn how to plant rice from the oldest member of our group, Mzee Gabriel (mzee is a respectful Swahili title meaning "old man"). Gabriel shouted a greeting to me as I got out of my car, and I tiptoed my way along the walls of the rice paddies to get to him. In order to grow rice, farmers have to build mud walls about two and a half feet high around the paddies to keep the irrigation water in place, and these double as "sidewalks" of sorts to get around without wading knee deep in water.

Yet while it's difficult to get to Gabriel's farm because of all the mud and water, when we get there the problem is that there isn't enough of either. Farmers have to plow the land thoroughly and then to level it before planting. The leveling happens after the paddy has been flooded, and then it has to be flooded again for planting. But because the group is still waiting for new pipes, because it's difficult to regulate water rationing in the group leaving the members further down the system vulnerable to shortages caused by those upstream, because so many people are planting rice and the river's water has sunk down in anticipation of the rains, Gabriel hasn't gotten enough water for the last 2 weeks to plant. He had hoped Tuesday would be different, but at least by 10 a.m. when I arrived, it was still too dry.

Gabriel speaks almost no English, so it takes a few minutes for me to realize that he wants to try to rearrange some piping to try to get more water to his rice paddy. But I finally get it, and we spend the next 25 minutes hauling around plastic piping, trying several different combinations to get the water, which is powered only by gravity, to come flowing into his field. But to no avail.

The farmer's life here is shaped by water: almost never enough, and then suddenly and surprisingly so much that her crops rot in the fields, and the rivers become impassable. Even after irrigation infrastructure arrives there are issues of water management, of rising and falling river levels, of maintenance. And you wonder: how does anyone survive in a business where the biggest factor is totally unpredictable and totally out of the business owner's control?

Lucky for me, Gabriel's farm is pretty close to his sister's. She is also a member of the group, and she's got just enough water to allow for a little planting. And so Gabriel grabs his nephew and the three of us begin. While the nephew jogs over to the rice nursery to pick the seedlings we'll plant, Gabriel and I wade into mud up almost to our knees, and begin leveling the surface of the paddy to prepare for planting. The mud is deep, and I sometimes sink up to my knees, but the sun is hot overhead and the cool water which continues to pour into the field mixes with the soil and keeps me surprisingly cool.

Plant seedlings are amazingly tough. If you're new to gardening like me, you tend to treat your seedlings like fragile pieces of glass or china that might break at any moment. But the farmers rip them up by the bunch full and toss them around almost carelessly. They know that God's immense creativity has brought forth unmeasurable strength hidden within those bright green shoots, that if He hadn't few would ever make it to the table. And so I grab a fistful and, following Gabriel's lead, begin planting the seedlings deep in the muddy soil in tight rows. When you plant rice you're bent down to the ground almost the entire time, and you walk backwards, and I do neither of these with anything approaching either the speed or grace of my two teachers.

And as I bend over in that muddy rice paddy and shove fistfuls of rice into the dark sticky soil, we begin to talk and laugh and hear each other's stories afresh. I learn that Gabriel has 10 kids of his own, and takes care of 5 orphans besides, that he used to sell vegetables in Nairobi and that he rented this land when the water came and his business started to lose money. He asked me about America, about our farming, asked me to greet Rebecca. After about an hour we take a break when Gabriel's wife bring us mugs of hot uji, a porridge made from millet and sorghum. We hide under the shade of some nearby maize stalks and I drink two mugs. Throughout the day the exotic birds brought here by the sudden appearance of great quantities of water flit back and forth over our heads, nesting in the trees and resting on stalks of maize still standing in the fields.

And then, after another go at it, we finish planting the small section which has received enough water, and hide in the shade of a small solitary tree in the middle of the rice paddies. We eat heaping bowls of rice and beans. I say my good-byes, Gabriel thanks me for coming. I will go home to Nairobi, but he'll stay behind and work in the fields till after dark . . . till enough water comes for him to finish his field.

And I am struck again by the kindness and strength of these people, who know the land and get their daily bread by it, who welcome strangers like me into their homes, their work, their meals, their lives. Amazed by men and women old enough to be the parents of my parents who work from sunup till sundown, and yet who fill their working hours with happy Swahili chatter and often spend their lives working beside their siblings, their nephews and nieces, their own children. Amazed by all of this, and what's more by God's good creation, by His gifts mysteriously given and received. For is not all of this planting and harvesting just a more complicated gathering of manna in the wilderness? For who can explain how it is that the rice which we eat under that solitary tree comes from the small seeds planted in muddy soil four months previously? No, it is all grace and gift from start to finish, divine and mysterious. And my brief participation in this particular mystery is also a gift, a gift given last Tuesday and in nearly 700 other days spent in this country which is just different enough from my own to make God's great grandeuer unmistakeable. And for all of it, I am truly grateful.

Michael