by Bill Bryson
“And has it worked?” I asked.
“Brilliantly, everywhere we’ve done it. It’s amazing how long it took aid agencies to figure out that people really, really don’t want dependency. They want to help themselves.”
“Only natural,” I observed wisely.
“Only natural,” he agreed.
We returned to our vehicles and plunged deeper into the broad and comely Lambwe Valley. At length we stopped at a small farm, where we met a sweet and eager young farmer named William Gumbo. Gumbo owns four acres of good but semi-arid land in the most gorgeous setting in the very heart of the valley. It was almost uncannily reminiscent of Tuscany or Provence—a place of dry, warm, shimmering beauty. I can’t tell you how much I wish you could have met William Gumbo, for he was an inspiration.
Until 1999 Gumbo scratched a living raising maize and millet and a few chickens. Then CARE stepped into his life. As part of its Dak Achana (Kiswahili for “healthy households”) programme, it introduced him to a couple of agricultural specialists, who showed him ways to increase his yields and diversify crops. Today he runs a model farm—a four-acre outburst of verdant plenty in the midst of a dry, bare valley. He grows peas, tomatoes, bananas, pineapples, passion fruit, mangos and much else. Only sweet potatoes have been a failure: some livestock broke through a fence and gobbled them up.
William Gumbo loves his farm. He carries a hardback ledger in which he records every detail of his plants’ lives. Ask him about his banana trees and he will search through the book and tell you that he planted 310 of them on 20 April 2001, and then show you a weekly chronicle of their progress since. Everything is grown from seeds or cuttings. Nothing has been nursed on from a pot. It’s all from scratch.
He showed us a grove of eucalyptus trees—I,200 in all— that he has coaxed into being from seed. After a year and a half they are already 15 feet tall. In another year and a half they will provide excellent wood for timber and poles. The same amount of land devoted to maize would produce about 16,000 Kenyan shillings in income over three years. The eucalypts in the same period could produce as much as 200,000 shillings of income—over $2,500, a sum that most Kenyan farmers would find almost inconceivable.
The idea of the project is that CARE helps Gumbo create a model farm, then moves elsewhere. Gumbo, meanwhile, teaches what he has learned to his neighbours. Already he has helped 300 other farmers in the district.
The Lambwe Valley is not an easy place to prosper. It has long been notorious as one of the worst sites in east Africa for tse-tse fly. The fly populations have been much reduced in recent years, but they still take a good number of animals. The valley is also cruelly drought prone. As of early October, it hadn’t seen rain in over five months, so farming here will always be an uphill battle. Even if all goes well, William Gumbo will still be poor. His house has a dirt floor and it will be a very long time before he is luxuriating in shag carpets. But he will probably have enough to buy his kids school uniforms—a prerequisite for attending even state schools in Kenya—or textbooks or pencils or a birthday present.
William Gumbo, in short, is a happy man and he has a future. Surely every human being is entitled to at least that much.
Saturday, October 5
Well, that’s pretty much it, I’m afraid. We had another day in the countryside before we returned to Nairobi and flew home. We visited a tea plantation in Kericho, lunched with some jolly white farmers and toured a huge flower growing operation on the shores of Lake Naivasha, but for me the trip ended with the happy villagers at Ogongo Tir and their beloved well, and with the heroic William Gumbo.
Obviously there is only so much you can learn about a country in eight days. We didn’t have time even to visit many of CARE’s projects in Kenya, and Kenya is only a small part of what it does. But I saw enough to realize that Kenya is a terrific country that is just full of William Gumbos and Consolata Ododas (the lady, you will recall, selling oddments at Kisumu’s market) and Jillani Ngallas (the young man who longs to be a paleontologist but probably will never make it) and 30 million other people just as individual and real. I don’t suppose they can all be saintly and deserving, but they do have one thing in common with the rest of us: they are human beings. And, like us, they get only one life apiece, so naturally they tend to appreciate it—appreciate it very much, I believe—when people from a more comfortable part of the world take the trouble to help them make theirs better. For that’s what CARE does, you see. It makes lives better, in 64 countries, thousands of times every day.
I don’t know if you are fully aware of it, but in acquiring this slender volume you didn’t actually buy a book. You made a generous donation to a worthy cause and got a free book in return, which isn’t quite the same thing. It’s much nobler. On behalf of CARE, thank you.
As I am sure the jacket conspicuously notes, my publishers, Transworld in Britain and Broadway Books in the United States, are also not taking a penny of profit from this—I know, I can hardly believe it myself—which means that a great many people behind the scenes worked hard for free to make this happen, and at the very busiest time of their working year. I think they deserve a special thanks, and most of your future purchases.
As for me and the rest of us in our party, well, we’re very grateful too—grateful to the CARE people in Kenya for showing us around, and to you for your support. And best of all, not once in the week did we get rubbed with dung.
CARE SAYS THANKYOU ...
. . . for buying Bill Bryson’s African Diary. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.
This book was made possible through the generosity and hard work of many people—from CARE staff and the Kenyan communities they serve, to the staff of Broadway Books and Transworld Publishers.
And, of course, this book would not have been possible without Bill Bryson, one of the world’s finest travel writers, who withstood a punishing schedule to produce his first book on Africa, the royalties from which he is donating to CARE.
THE FACTS ABOUT POVERTY
Today, nearly half of humanity struggles to survive on less than $2 a day. More than 30 countries are gripped by armed conflict. AIDS threatens to take as many lives as all the wars of the twentieth century. Our world is indeed faced with complex challenges.
Yet every day, CARE sees victories over poverty that are neither captured by global statistics nor covered on the nightly news: A farmer in Malawi who grows enough food to feed his family. A young girl in Afghanistan who becomes the first in her family to attend school. A healthy child who is protected against preventable illnesses such as polio.
While people in poor communities face daunting odds, they also possess the determination and capability to improve their lives and bring us all closer to a world where poverty has been overcome.
CARE
CARE is one of the world’s leading international poverty-fighting organizations. With more than 55 years of experience, CARE understands the depth and scope of poverty. And we have no doubt that something can be done about it. Our integrated programs in more than 60 countries not only provide immediate assistance to families in need, they also work with communities to create long-term solutions to poverty.
We believe that together we can make the world better, more stable and safer for all. We take this goal seriously. So it’s not enough to simply alleviate the symptoms of poverty. CARE works with communities to find the source of the problem and solve it. For good.
MOVING AHEAD WITH CARE
Our efforts to overcome poverty depend on the support of people like you—people who care about the world in which they live. With your help, we can create lasting, positive change in communities around the world.
CARE is an effective and efficient steward of your investment. We direct 90 percent of our expended resources toward an array of poverty-fighting programs. And on average, for every $1 in private support raised, CARE can leverage another $5 in support from public sources.
To learn more about CARE and how to join our efforts
to overcome poverty, please visit CARE’s global homepage, www.care.org.
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
The Lost Continent
Mother Tongue
Neither Here nor There
Made in America
Notes from a Small Island
A Walk in the Woods
I’m a Stranger Here Myself
In a Sunburned Country
Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words
Go to the Next Page to Read Chapter 7 from
Bill Bryson’s At Home
Coming in October 2010
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
THE DRAWING ROOM
I
If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.
Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing room was challenged in more refined circles by the French salon, which was sometimes anglicized to saloon, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that saloon came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile. Salon, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments. Parlor, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French parler, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.
Drawing room is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By mid-century it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by sitting room, a term first appearing in English in 1806. A later challenger was lounge, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America, living room came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove parlor out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.
Assuming he was a conventional sort of fellow, Mr. Marsham would have strived to make his drawing room the most comfortable room in the house, with the softest and finest furnishings. In practice, however, it was probably anything but comfortable for much of the year, since it has just one fireplace, which could do no more than warm a small, central part of the room. Even with a good fire going, I can attest, it is possible in the depths of winter to stand across the room and see your breath.
Though the drawing room became the focus of comfort in the home, the story doesn’t actually start there; it doesn’t start in the house at all. It starts outdoors, a century or so before Mr. Marsham’s birth, with a simple discovery that would make landed families like his very rich and allow him one day to build himself a handsome rectory. The discovery was merely this: land didn’t have to be rested regularly to retain its fertility. It was not the most staggering of insights, but it changed the world.
Traditionally, most English farmland was divided into long strips called furlongs and each furlong was left fallow for one season in every three—sometimes one season in two—so that it could recover its ability to produce healthy crops.* This meant that in any given year at least one-third of the nation’s farmland stood idle. In consequence, there wasn’t sufficient feed to keep large numbers of animals alive through the winter, so landowners had no choice but to slaughter most of their stock each autumn and face a long, lean period till spring.
Then English farmers discovered something that Dutch farmers had known for a long time: if turnips, clover, or one or two other amenable crops were sown on the idle fields, they miraculously refreshed the soil and produced a bounty of winter fodder into the bargain. It was the infusion of nitrogen that did it, though no one would understand that for nearly two hundred years. What was understood, and very much appreciated, was that crop rotation transformed agricultural fortunes dramatically. Moreover, because more animals lived through the winter, they produced heaps of additional manure, and these glorious, gratis ploppings enriched the soil even further.
It is hard to exaggerate what a miracle all this seemed. Before the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. An academic named W. G. Hoskins calculated (in 1964) that between 1480 and 1700, one harvest in four was bad, and almost one in five was catastrophically bad. Now, thanks to the simple expedient of crop rotation, agriculture was able to settle into a continuous, more or less reliable prosperity. It was this long golden age that gave so much of the countryside the air of prosperous comeliness it enjoys still today, and allowed the likes of Mr. Marsham to embrace that gratifying new commodity: comfort.
Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire. Called a seed drill, it allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil rather than broadcast by hand. Seed was expensive, and Tull’s new drill reduced the amount needed from three or four bushels per acre to under one; and because the seeds were planted at even depths in neat rows, more of them sprouted successfully, so yields improved dramatically, too, from between twenty and forty bushels an acre to as much as eighty.
The new vitality was also reflected in breeding programs. Nearly all the great cattle breeds—Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, Aberdeen Angus, Ayrshire*—were eighteenth-century creations. Sheep likewise were successfully manipulated to become the bundles of unnatural fleeciness we see today. A medieval sheep gave about a pound and a half of wool; re-engineered eighteenth-century sheep gave up to nine pounds. Underneath all that lovely fleece, sheep were gratifyingly plumper, too. Between 1700 and 1800, the average weight of sheep sold at Smithfield Market in London more than doubled, from thirty-eight pounds to eighty. Beef cattle expanded similarly. Dairy yields went up, too.
All this was not without cost, however. To make the new systems of production work, it was necessary to amalgamate small fields into large ones and move the peasant farmers off the land. This enclosure movement, in which small fields that had formerly supported many were converted into much larger enclosed fields that enriched a few, made farming immensely lucrative for those with large holdings—and soon in many areas that was almost the only kind of holding there was. Enclosure had been going on slowly for centuries, but it gathered pace between 1750 and 1830, when some six million acres of British farmland were enclosed. Enclosure was hard on the displaced peasant farmers, but it did leave them and their descendants conveniently available to move to towns and become the toiling masses of the new Industrial Revolution—which was also just beginning and was funded to a very large extent by the surplus wealth enjoyed by the ever-richer landowners.
Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed
for industry. This didn’t always represent a notable advance in beauty—at one time in the eighteenth century, eighty-five open-cast coal mines could be seen from Chatsworth House, or so it has been said—but it did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. Still others made money from leasing land to railways or building canals and controlling rights of way. The Duke of Bridgewater earned annual returns of 40 percent—and really returns don’t get much better than that—from a canal monopoly in the West Country. All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest—almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked. Many people were born into a world in which they had to do virtually nothing with their wealth but stack it. The third Earl of Burlington, to take one example of many, owned vast estates in Ireland—some forty-two thousand acres in all—and never visited the country. Eventually he was made lord treasurer of Ireland and still never visited it.
This wealthy elite and their offspring covered the British countryside with stout and rambling expressions of this new joie de richesse. By one count, at least 840 large country houses were built in England between 1710 and the end of the century—”dispersed like great rarity plums in a vast pudding of a country,” in the exuberant words of Horace Walpole.
Extraordinary houses need extraordinary people to design and build them, and perhaps none was more extraordinary—or at least more unexpected—than Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726).* Vanbrugh came from a large family—he was one of nineteen children—that was well-to-do and of Dutch extraction, though they had been settled in England for nearly half a century by the time Vanbrugh himself was born.
