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On September 7, 1998, members of the Utooni Development Project, based in the village of Kola, Kenya, donated 2.5 tons of food to the starving people of southern Sudan. Upon hearing stories on the Sudan famine, Joshua Mukusya, the UDP leader, asked Harold Miller of Mennonite Central Committee to help transport a food donation.
UDP members warmly welcomed the MCC delegation as they arrived with a truck. In a brief ceremony, Miller reviewed the needs in Sudan and thanked the community for its assistance. Mukusya later said some community members had chided him for not giving them time to collect more food.
Everyone pitched in to load the sacks of maize, cows peas, millet and pigeon peas into the truck. The MCC representatives stayed in Kola for several hours to visit with Mukusya, and to see the banana, sweet potato, kale and tomato crops on his three-hectare farm. The farm also includes a dairy herd of five-to-seven cows, fed by crop foliage left after harvest.
Mukusya talked about returning to his home farm over 20 years ago after the sudden death of his father. He was given a plot of land which others in the community considered unproductive. However, he decided to apply innovations he had learned as a professional agricultural manager. After getting "permission" from the community elders through numerous consultations under the "village tree", he started a development plan which eventually helped community members become virtually self-sufficient.
Early in his life, Mukusya had trained for the Christian ministry. But somewhere along the way he decided to spend his life as a "priest of the land", caring for the land and building community.
Mukusya and others in the community registered themselves as a farmers' development organization. With government grants, they built dams across streams for irrigation, and concrete water tanks to gather water from roofs. The community now has over 100 dams and thousands of tanks. The community also re-introduced the practice of terracing to control erosion and absorb rainfall.
Cooperative members are required to construct terraces on their land, grow nutritious food, acquire the facility to produce milk, plant trees, establish a bank account and send their children to school.
The cooperative has around 120 members. The names are written on the wall of the grinding mill. A few names have been crossed out—because they either stole funds or didn't fulfill their obligations.
Every Monday, members work on some project that enhances either the Development Project or the larger community. At the weekly sessions, each member contributes 60 shillings to a traditional "round robin" assistance scheme.
Mukusya's wife Rhoda manages the day-to-day operations of their farm, freeing Joshua to offer up to 60% of his time to the UDP.
On their farm is an old Mazda pick-up truck, jacked up on blocks, with the wheels missing. On the truck door are the words "Utooni Development Project". The truck is no longer in use because Mukusya found that having a truck placed him too far ahead of other community members. The truck also detracted from his work—he was spending too much time driving others around. He now prefers to walk the half-hour distance from his home to the village. His farm produce is delivered to markets by public transport—small vans that navigate the rutted, dirt roads.
Mukusya's house also has a television aerial, but he no longer has the television set, since it became the target of theft. He explained that development needs to proceed slowly, with the community moving ahead as a group.
Harold F. Miller is MCC southern Sudan representative, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Ron Rempel served with MCC in Kenya while on leave from his work as editor of Canadian Mennonite.
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