The Balancing Act

The soil in much of Palakumi location, Ganze district, is red. It is the red of desert rocks in the American southwest, the red of a sunrise mellowed by a thin layer of clouds in the east, a red that gets in your socks and shoes, and dusts the cuffs of your trousers. As the wind kicks up, the red dust spreads itself over the rest of your clothes, finding seams and pockets in which to deposit itself.

Red color in the earth is usually an indication of an old, weathered soil, with a high proportion of iron oxides and a low nutrient holding capacity. Most of the soil in Palakumi is sandy, like a beach. Sandy soil makes for easy cultivation and tillage, but does not retain much in the way of water or nutrients. The rains do not fall in abundance there. The majority of the vegetation is low bushes and scrub, a few grasses, and some scattered trees. Most of the trees that have been left produce something that was once a cash crop, either coconuts or cashews. They stand in irregular clusters. Buyers no longer come for the cashews since the factory was moved to a different district. A few locals tap the coconuts to make a syrupy alcohol that keeps unemployed young men occupied for the day. The clumps of trees are like little segments of the forest that once spread over the whole region, holding tightly to what is left of the soil. If you pick up a handful of the red sand, it sifts back through your fist without holding any form. It appears, on first analysis, to be relatively devoid of organic material, as if the scattered leaves and grasses break down into nothing and simply disappear.

Soil organic matter is integral to a healthy agro-ecosystem. Organic matter can bind mineral particles together, helping aggregation and increasing porosity. Organic matter can tie up nutrients so they are not immediately available to plants, but it can also build up a long-term store, increasing the overall nutrient holding capacity of the soil. Organic matter provides a balance between the benefits and drawbacks of both sandy and clay soils and a buffer to shifts in soil pH. Without organic matter, sandy soils like those I saw in Palakumi can see nutrients quickly leached away, and crops, without the aid of substantial inputs, will grow poorly.

And yet when Gabriel hears that Ganze or Kilifi districts are the poorest in the country, he disagrees. He tells Benson and I that there are riches waiting to be tapped right here, from the ground under our feet. He, a farmer and retired teacher, sees potential in this dry, red soil. He says the metric that they use to measure wealth is flawed. Benson nods in agreement. He is an extension agent with whom I have been walking across the community, visiting farmers participating in our organization’s program. More than any other element of my first impression of Ganze district, it is the optimism and the belief in the ability to move forward that I find striking and valuable to take with me. Gabriel, Benson and I sit for a couple of hours at the end of a long day, discussing myriad topics, from the upcoming Constitutional Referendum in Kenya to agricultural practices in the United States.

At the end of my stay in Palakumi location, my feelings are mixed. I am optimistic about the participation of the farmers in the program and their enthusiasm. I am eager to begin work in my role of developing training programs for the extension agents with whom I work. At the same time I am concerned about the expectations that are in place already. Managing the expectations of the people who pull their livelihood from that dry, sandy, red soil, may prove to be as much of a challenge as the logistics of delivering trees to our expanding network of farmers and extension workers. If expectations are not managed well, even results that the organization would deem a success could turn out to be a failure in the farmers' eyes.

The challenges facing any development project are innumerable. Creating a problem definition helps in that it gives structure to a project, and yet it hinders in that it allows for the exclusion of elements integral to the human, natural, and agricultural ecologies at work. It is all too easy for the organization, on the path to completing its goals, to ignore those factors that are outside the scope of its problem definition. As in the soil, where a balance of sand, silt, clay, organic material, air and water make a healthy system, a development organization must strive to balance the factors pushing and pulling it in different directions. From the expectations of program participants and donors, to the science and logistics behind the operations, to the mundane details of the budget, it is imperative to allow for a sharp focus on the task at hand without losing that task's place in the broader picture. Looking forward, I try to balance my optimism with caution, my assumptions with an open mind, and the limited scope of my training project with the breadth of Gabriel’s everyday life in Palakumi location, Ganze district. In the end, hoping not to sound too much of a reductionist, I have come to think that balance itself is a goal. When we speak of sustainability, that ill-defined concept so popular in the vocabularies of development, economics, and environmental management, it may be valuable to keep that goal in mind. Balance in the soil, balance in the organization, and balance in development as a whole.