Nyumbani

It sounds like a type of sweet does it?  And with what it is doing it could well be the best sweet in the world.

Nyumbani exists between Nairobi and the Kenyan desert.  It is a village with a difference.  Built around a central football pitch it expands out in sections like a budding flower that is slowly opening it's petals.  Each cluster of four houses has a garden and each house of each cluster has its own water tank.  Complete with a farm and rows and rows of trees Nyumbani is full of children, hundreds of them running to and from the two schools where the only 'parent' age adults come to teach during the day before going home at night.  For that is what sets this village apart - there are children, there are 'grandparents' but there are no adults.  There is a missing generation in this place.

Nyumbani is an experiment.  Africa has been gutted by two modern plagues: the AIDS pandemic and the food crisis but the founders of Nyumbani think they have the solution to both ills - house the orphans of AIDS with grieving grandparents and teach them the mixture of modern and ancient farming techniques which allows them to grow enough, precisely, to feed them.

Joseph Lentunyoi, a sustainability manager says:
“This village is unique”, he says. “You see we are not diverting the children into a quite different life, like other orphanages, but are managing to maintain their culture.”

There are thousands of orphans in the surrounding area and those lucky enough to be taken care of usually grow up in school-like buildings in Nairobi, sleeping in long dormitories far from their villages. Re-integration to rural life, at 18, is almost impossible. Nyumbani has another vision, which Joseph explains:

“The children stay in touch with their villages, which are near. The kids they secure their ancestral land. When the child is an adult, independent, they can go back to the land they came from.”
There are other advantages, too. “We place them in a family set up, which is of course an African set up.” Each grandparent will take on 10 children, and they share a home together which is provided for them.

There is a great advantage to this set up - mental care.  These 'grandparents' have seen it all; war, disease, famine, there isn't one of them that hasn't come their way.  They have lost sons and daughters and felt the bewildering chaos of grief, experience that they can then use to help the traumatised children that come under their care.

Africa is one of the few societies were age is the ultimate badge of honour and respect.  If you have made it to being a grandparent you have seen the world and your knowledge is the knowledge of mountains.  While 'parents' teach education, it is to the 'grandparent' that the child turn to for wisdom.  By enshrining that at the centre of the 'families' of Nyumbani, the village founders have captured part of the soul of Africa.

Out of the stability of the village has come sustainability.  Some of the children that went back to their homelands at eighteen have now returned as teachers and the village has reached out hands to the surrounding villages, both feeding them and feeding from them.  In this way it has become the model, in an insecure continent, for food security.  The simplicity and generosity with this has been done is mind boggling.

For instant, the village is too big for a perimeter fence. So instead the outer plots were given away to surrounding villages, which could then feed themselves instead of stealing from Nyumbani and what is more, sell the surplus back to Nyumbani.  Now if someone tries to damage this community, it is the communities surrounding it that leap to it's defence.

 “They have become our fence, but also our friends”, one resident of Nyambani says. “Once you put up a fence, they are not your friends.”

Local knowledge is used too. “We have a gentleman who digs the wells here and he has been doing it for years”, says Joseph. “He knows how to find water just using a stick. This saves us money – we don’t have to hire guys from the ministry of water.”

There was a long drought in east Africa between 2007 and 2009, particularly in east Kenya. But the wells at Nyumbani, built using modern techniques which sink water slowly into the soil, never ran dry.  These shallow sink-wells have fertilized the soil and helped form a microclimate around the village, which is noticeably cooler and breezier than the area around it. Growing trees is a long term project, nourishing the soil and producing timber to sell, while vegetables and the farm will feed the village in the short term. The place is moving steadily towards its target: self-sustainability by 2018.

Another benefit that the trees bring is that, once there is enough of them to cool the atmosphere above the village, they will encourage the rain to fall again and when it does the trees will help hold it to the surface.  The man who planted trees would be proud of these people.

This village may have been started with aid but a huge lump of its success is down to the ideas with which is was founded, the gusto that the ordinary, 'little' people have worked on making them work and the fact that some of the people who founded the project are still here, making sure that it will be able to stand up on its own two feet before they leave.

Sister Mary Owens, a nun from Ireland, was here at the project’s conception. Such a completed vision, she says dryly, is rare, as  other charities often come in only to leave again before projects are able to stand up on their own.

“The World food programme, for example, is now having to pull back. They worked in 3 month targets, which is too short a time to get anything done. Practically, there needs to be a much more comprehensive approach to solving this, and that is a government task.”

But with such success, just why is the village so unique? Joseph says government ministers have been to see the village, but have no plans to replicate it. “They are very good at saying yes. But then nothing is done.”
The concept, though, he says, is very straightforward: act locally, and use the resources you have.
“It’s really quite simple, but people complicate it. You need to work with nature and not against nature. The moment we work against nature is the moment we are preparing to die.”
“At the moment I am thinking about buying fertiliser from Nairobi, which is too expensive, is not affordable, is not sustainable, and I am preparing to die. Why can’t I just make my own compost? It is friendly to the soil.”

The concept is certainly working here. An artificial village?  Yes, but aren't all villages man made when you stop and think about it?  The only creatures that come close to building permanent 'towns' akin to the ones humans build are ants and termites.  Doesn't that give you something to think about?  A test tube?  Certainly, but when a test tube is growing something this healthy, happy and undeniably sweet you just can't break it.  Not if you love your fellow human beings.