Stories from the field

Rwentondo is a bend in the river with eleven households farming down to the water. It is the stretch this organisation points at when somebody asks what the work actually looks like, so it is worth slowing down and telling it properly.

The first visit was a walk with a notebook. No promises, no seedlings — just the length of the bend, where the bank had gone, and who was farming which piece. That took a morning and produced nothing anybody could photograph.

The second visit was the difficult one. Eleven households, and the land title said one thing while the people actually growing beans on it said another. Two agreed on the spot. Six wanted to know what they were getting back. Three said no.

One of the three was right to. Her plot is the narrowest on the bend, and a three-metre buffer would have taken close to a fifth of what she grows. We planted around her. A year later she asked whether the offer still stood. It did.

Planting itself took two days. Bamboo at the waterline, Markhamia set back, fruit trees behind that on the households' own ground so the exchange was visible from their doorways. Then the part that decides everything: coming back at six months, counting, and replacing the fifth that had died.