'Money maker' miracle of lush vegetable garden in arid West Pokot

Monica Kitudu is a farmer uses a mechanical machine dubbed 'money maker' to irrigate her vegetable farm in West Pokot [GARDY CHACHA/STANDARD]

Imagine a lush green garden of vegetables straddling the landscape in an arid area. ‘Beautiful’ would be an understatement.

 It looks magnificent. And that is how you are likely to bump onto Monica Kitudu’s farm, in Simatwa, Kongelai, West Pokot. It is all made possible by a single mechanical apparatus that Kitudu uses for irrigation.

“People from here call it ‘miracle’. It has made a vegetable farm a reality where none existed before. It is a first around here,” she says.

Even Kitudu herself is yet to grasp the reality of it.

When she received it, at the beginning of the year, she had her doubts too. But she had been told the gadget is called ‘money maker’ and she was curious to find out why.

“’How would this small metallic thing create a green farm on this dry earth?’” her skepticism still feels surreal.

HARD WORKING MOTHER

Then she set it up: anchored it at a corner on a small plot she intended to use for trial, “just in case it turned out to be a scrap metal,” she says.

With help from her husband, a pastoralist who believes in animals and not crops, she connected the pipes. The gadget works along banks of seasonal rivers; where sand is dug out into a 10ft well – deep enough for water to come out.

“We wait for the water to sip into the void then put the siphon in,” she describes, “one person continuously steps on the ‘money maker’ and water pours out through the pipe.”

Kitudu’s farm does not only stand out: it is the only one within a huge radius – as far as the human sight can go.

We had to ride on a motor cycle (there is no path for cars to drive through) for 20 minutes then walked past a series of valleys and hills for another 20 minutes. We settled at an open clearance just beside a large seasonal river; its girth matching that of river Nile.

So, when we are ushered into this vegetable farm – with kale, spinach, black night shade and an assortment of traditional species – for a moment we forget that we are in West Pokot.

It is hard to reconcile the image before us with what we have always known about West Pokot: a cavalcade of drought-related calamities.

It should be known though that the Pokot are pastoralists. The impetus for crop agriculture is nearly non-existent in their way of life.

Coincidentally, we found out, Kitudu’s husband – together with other men who own cattle – moved across the border into Uganda last June in search of pasture and water for their cattle.

“It will be another three months before he comes back,” she says.

In the previous years she had worried every time her husband took the odyssey into Uganda. That is because he left her with 10 children to feed and only one cow to milk.

“It would be three long months. Milk from one cow is not enough to earn money for flour and vegetables to feed my family. It was difficult to make ends meet,” she says.

This little metallic gadget, which she only has to step on to draw water into her vegetable garden, has greatly improved the quality of life for her family. Neighbours too appreciate Kitudu’s farm because she sells her produce to them at low cost.

Kitudu was a lucky recipient of the ‘money maker’ from humanitarian group Actionaid, through a project dubbed Shifting the Power (STP), which aims at giving women like her clout and the audacity to drive their own growth.

“The old method of giving aid has largely mimicked giving man fish instead of teaching him how to fish. We are seeking to change that – so that people own up to the process of improving their lives,” says Grace Ireri, the program manager for STP.

‘Money maker’ has kicked off a whirl wind storm of gossip in Kongelai and now “everyone wants to have it to start a vegetable farm of their own,” Kitudu says.

Does that mean that using the gadget is all easy and smooth?

“No” she says.

“It requires a lot of mechanical energy to draw water using ‘money maker’. It tires the body. It does not run on fuel or electricity. Even if it did we are kilometers away from the nearest electricity line.” But off course this is a little price to pay in exchange for a weekly harvest of vegetables.