Word: sauri
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...meeting took place on the grounds of a school called the Bar Sauri Primary School, where headmistress Anne Marcelline Omolo shepherds hundreds of schoolchildren through primary education and the travails of daily life. Despite disease, orphanhood and hunger, all 33 of last year's eighth-grade class passed the Kenyan national secondary-school exams. On a Sunday last July, we saw why. On their "day off" from school, this year's class of eighth-graders sat at their desks from 6:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. preparing months in advance for this year's national examinations in November. Unfortunately, many...
...years back, Sauri's residents cooked with locally collected wood, but the decline in the number of trees has left the area bereft of sufficient fuel. Villagers said that they now buy pieces of fuel wood in Yala or Muhanda, a bundle of seven sticks costing around 30¢. Not only are seven sticks barely enough to cook one meal, but for a lack of 30¢, many villagers had in fact reverted to cooking with cow dung or to eating uncooked meals...
...meeting got under way, I canvassed the group and got very perceptive accounts of the grim situation. Only two of the 200 farmers at the meeting reported using fertilizer at present. Around 25% are using improved fallows with nitrogen-fixing trees, a scientific farming approach developed and introduced into Sauri by the World Agroforestry Center. With this novel technique, villagers grow trees that naturally return nitrogen to the soil by converting it from the atmosphere, thus dramatically improving yields. The new method could be used throughout the village if more money were available for planting the trees alongside their maize...
...dying village's isolation is stunning. There are no cars or trucks owned or used within Sauri, and only a handful of villagers said they had ridden in any kind of motorized transport during the past year. Around half of the individuals at the meeting said that they had never made a phone call in their entire lives...
...Survival depends on addressing a series of specific challenges, all of which can be met with known, proven, reliable and appropriate technologies and interventions. (Thanks to a grant from the Lenfest Foundation in the U.S., the Earth Institute at Columbia University will put some novel ideas to work in Sauri.) Sauri's villages, and impoverished villages like them all over the world, can be set on a path of development at a cost that is tiny for the world but too high for the villages themselves and for the Kenyan government on its own. African safari guides speak...