Excellent! - excellentdevelopment.com

Planting trees is my hobby, because where there are trees the place is beautiful. Where there are no trees, there is no rain. We wish we had more water here.

This is why we are storing water in the river next to my farm. My neighbours and I built a sand dam there in 2003 and it has helped us a lot. Now we are expanding it and adding another sand dam upstream.

People get together to do work because one person cannot do anything. Many hands make work easier.

I was born in 1938. My wife Esther and I have seven children. Two of them still live with us, along with my son's wife and their two children.

When there was no sand dam, there was not enough water. Our crops died, and our cows had trouble because they had no water. We used to get water for ourselves from a spring several miles away.

For nearly 30 years, I lived in the city of Nairobi, Kenya's capital. I was a mechanic. I retired in 1995 and moved back here to the countryside to be with my wife.

I like living here better, because in Nairobi it's too expensive. I grow my own food now, and there I had to buy food to live.

Before we had the sand dam, I had to buy food here too. But now I grow enough maize, beans and other crops so that I don't have to buy food for my family.

I even sell some vegetables, bananas and trees. This money helps one of my daughters study science and agriculture at the University of Nairobi. I'm proud of her, because she is going to be a farmer like her father.

Many people in the area use the water from the sand dam. When I meet with my neighbours, we discuss what we can do with our farms. My family has started growing kale, cabbages, tomatoes, papaya, green peppers and many different kinds of trees. Some kinds of trees are used for timber, firewood or shade. Some can be used as medicine and others bear fruit.

Our tree nursery has hundreds of seedlings, and we water them twice a day with water from the sand dam. We dig holes, and before the rain starts, we fill the holes with dirt and manure and then we plant the trees there.

Patrick Musyimi Mutiso lives in Mbuani, Machakos, Kenya.

- First published in the January/February 2006 issue of "a Common Place", an MCC publication. Copyright MCC 2006.

- MCC are a major funding partner of Excellent Development (Kenya).