The first profession and other stories from Dodoma

Lead farmers in Dodoma

Chrispin Mirambo, MCC Tanzania’s Food and Water Security Coordinator, has been working with small-scale farmers for more than twenty years, with the Lutheran Church, Heifer Project, and now MCC for the past 8 years. And so, when I was finally able to observe a training session for lead farmers last week in Dodoma (my first time as a new MCC Representative), I was expecting to learn a lot about low-tillage agriculture. Instead, I witnessed the process of empowering local farmers with confidence that they could move forward themselves as experts in climate-smart agriculture.

Role playing with lead farmers

The Anglican Diocese of Central Tanganyika started working with MCC about 5 years ago, promoting conservation agriculture in the arid regions around Tanzania’s new capital city, Dodoma. They began by offering some initial technical training in low tillage for soil quality improvement, mulching for water retention, and crop rotation for nitrogen-fixing. Next, local community members selected lead farmers – people who were passionate about trying out a new system of agriculture, with a good reputation in the community and were moderately literate. This current project has been going for two and a half years already, and so we met with six established lead farmers. Three newly appointed lead farmers were joining their ranks in this training, along with two government extension officers and two project field officers (two women and two men in their 20s).

a younger farmer in training!

The typical lead farmer in this community is a married woman with several children (a few with a nursing child along for the training), ready to take notes, think, discuss, and offer opinions. These seven women were joined by a Mzee, a venerable older man with a gorgeous twinkle in his eye whenever he smiled (which was often) and a younger man.

When we finished our introductions, I was expecting a review of agricultural methodology, but instead, Chrispin dove right in, and started to ask them about how the community was doing with conservation agriculture. What successes had they observed? What challenges were they facing? Each lead farmer was given the chance to talk about their experiences. There were definitely some things that were working – harvest yields were up in fields with established CA. People were appreciating the approach. But there were challenges. For example, a lot of community members would come to the trainings, but then go home and never do anything with their new knowledge. Something was wrong with the seeds this year: seeds were planted and replanted this season and sometimes never germinated. There was too much rain last season. People’s fields had been destroyed by fires or ravaged by livestock passing through. It was hard work to dig all those holes, instead of plowing. And generally, people had a tendency towards just showing up in hopes of a travel allowance or free lunch.

Chrispin resisted all temptation to jump right in and address these very real problems. Instead, he split the lead farmers up into groups to analyze these challenges themselves and work on solutions. (The young extension officers had their own group). After lunch, each group had a chance to present their thoughts. This might seem very basic, but in Tanzania, there has been an historical dependence on outside experts to tell farmers what is best for them. Chrispin firmly believes that farmers themselves best know their own context; by stepping back, he is doing his best to ensure that farmers will continue to practice conservation agriculture, even when MCC ends project funding next year and DCT stops active work in these villages.

lead farmers presenting on problems

It is true that at the end of the day, Chrispin did offer some technical advice. For example, he explained that there were certain unscrupulous seed merchants who were buying up sterile hybrid GMO grain and passing it off as viable seed to farmers. He advised them that they were better off using regular seed but practicing some basic genetic selection: close to harvest, they should identify the tallest, most healthy stalks of grain and save biggest grains from the center of each cob. Even the old Mzee had never thought of doing this – like most farmers, he had always just scooped a random kilo of seeds off the top of his harvest for next year’s planting. Chrispin also admitted than in a very rainy year, like 2019, people practicing traditional agriculture would probably get a better harvest than CA farmers (because the rain water would run off of their fields, rather than soaking in and water-logging the improved soil in a CA field). However, he asked them, how often in Dodoma do you have too much rain? Almost never, they admitted.  As for disinterested neighbors, he cautioned the project against ever paying out allowances. People need to have the right motivation to take a risk with something new in farming.

On the second day, Chrispin worked hard to help the lead farmers define and take ownership of their own role. First, he asked them to just describe what they thought they were there to do. Next,  he briefly showed a poster with two images, one of Monday and the other of Tuesday, depicting farmers and fields. Then he hid the poster and played memory: what did you see? Participants named things: a goat, a field, a house, a tree. I realized that along with the game, Chrispin was making sure than everyone could interpret the simple drawing and connect it to the intended story – it’s not a given that people from different communities give lines and colors the same meaning that the artist intended. Next, he showed the images again and then asked: What is going on? Over time, they worked it out. A male lead farmer was viewing his own disorganized and unproductive field on Monday. Tuesday found him at the beautiful, abundant field of a woman farmer, giving her orders about what she needed to do better. The image led good discussions about the need to be living examples of what we are teaching, having the best field or garden possible before we start critiquing or teaching others.

Chrispin teaching from images

Next Chrispin role-played a situation where he was a lead farmer visiting a neighbor. He approached the young man with the briefest of greetings, refused to sit down and visit, and then proceeded directly to the man’s field, and without stopping to hear explanations, offered a running critique of everything the young man was doing. And then he rushed off to visit the next farmer. I have never seen Chrispin behave so harshly in my life! We all had a lot of fun pointing out everything wrong with that scenario. Even a westerner like me could see that the proper approach would be to sit and talk with the neighbor for ten minutes and find out what was happening in his life, before going on to agriculture. Unfortunately, this “bossy expert” style is often seen among extension officers; some lead farmers have been known to abandon their own community’s culture of politeness and relationality, believing that they, too, are expected to boss everyone around. Chrispin helped the participants see clearly how the relational approach (the one that comes naturally in rural Tanzania) is far more appropriate and effective.

Other images, discussions and role-plays led to discussions of gender issues in serving as a lead farmer, and the need for cooperation and consistency between the whole team of lead farmers and extension officers. This also led to a discussion of potential conflicts between different NGO’s teaching different approaches to improved agriculture.

Chrispin ended by preaching the dignity of farming to the gathered group. He mentioned that he has heard people say, “Oh, I don’t have a job, I just farm my shamba (field).” But he countered that farming was the first profession blessed by God when he told Adam to plow the land. “Your field, your kitchen garden, is your office!” And he pressed the lead farmers to recognize that they already know enough to keep implementing the goals of the project, even when the “project” is over. They can use climate-smart methods to increase yields so that people have more food available at home, and they are ready to keep teaching and mentoring their neighbors.

DCT staff Lister and Happy, with Chrispin

This was our final official MCC visit to the Chamwino Conservation Agriculture project. Our office closes at the end of December, and the funding ends in March. But I found myself leaving with a lot of hope that the approach Chrispin promotes goes beyond teaching techniques and tools: he is working to change mindsets and empower people to improve their own lives.

The lead farmer training was our main objective in going to Dodoma, but we managed to fit in several other components to our visit to the capital.

On Tuesday morning, we walked from our guesthouse to the next-door Dodoma School for the Deaf. Again, it was my first time to visit this wonderful organization and finally meet students. Their primary school has progressed to the point where all their Standard 7 students are passing the national exams at the end of primary school. And it is ranked in the top 25% of ALL primary schools nationwide for exam results. 

year 2 students

The students are bright and have nice facilities – especially textbooks for every student (provided by MCC) so that they do not need to rely on teacher lectures for content. Lower primary teachers have learned to use tactile learning aids (like bottle caps for counting) and brightly colored visual aids. A large percentage of the teachers are deaf themselves, giving them extra empathy for their pupils.

We were there first to simply thank the DSD leadership for their partnership with MCC, and to grieve together the fact that this partnership is ending prematurely with the closure of our office next month. The principal, Kennedy, listed at least 20 aspects of MCC support that have helped students succeed and it is sad to see this work ending. Part of our support has included training and technical advice from Chrispin, helping students learn about chicken farming, fish farming, and vegetable gardening as vocational skills.

Chrispin offered them one more training session about the proper feeding of farmed fish. It was quite fascinating to experience a very engaged group of fifty 4^th – 6^th graders, responding and answering questions, begging to be called on, and all in almost complete silence! Chrispin’s training and questions were all translated by one of the staff, but it was not too hard to learn the signs for fish and food! They already knew quite a lot about fish farming and so much of the lesson was review for them, but still helpful, I believe. 

I found myself dreaming about the day when I could dig my own pond and raise fish. It was very inspiring! After learning about raising the tilapia called Sato all morning, Chrispin and I went to a nearby local restaurant and both ordered delicious plates of Sato stewed with vegetables.

Next, we went to give greetings to the Mennonite Bishop who is now serving in Dodoma – he had recently been transferred from Arusha, so we knew him well. It was interesting to visit the mother church in that city and meet a few of the workers in the church. On our way back to the hotel, Chrispin gave me a bit of a guided tour by car around Dodoma, taking me past Parliament and then up to the University. It is a massive campus, built with a much larger future student body in mind, all white buildings, hovering on the edge of an escarpment looking down over the town. There is certainly no land pressure in Dodoma, but I would not want to be a student that had to walk 5 km from my dorm to my classes on the other side of campus!

Our final activity that evening was to meet two younger Mennonite men – one had been sponsored by MCC to attend a month-long peace institute in South Africa. The other had served with MCC in Goshen, Indiana for a year. We shared dinner with them back at the tilapia restaurant (Kisasa Capetown) and I especially enjoyed seeing Deus become more comfortable about remembering his experiences as an IVEP volunteer at an organic farm in a Mennonite college town.

kestrel in church

We spent most of the next two days in the lead farmer training, as I have already said, which was held inside a beautiful and striking Anglican church. Dodoma gets hot, so the architects had built the building with lots of open brick for airflow. In fact, it did sometimes get quite windy indoors! And I quite enjoyed studying a pair of kestrels who had no problem diving through the holes in the bricks and roosting in the high rafters. The second day of training was a Thursday and we realized that we needed to leave by noon that day to get home. There were in fact no open hotel rooms left in Dodoma that evening because Thursday was the day the re-elected president was sworn in, and the capital was swamped with official visitors. So, we could not have stayed any longer, even if we wanted to!

On our drive home, I continued to learn so much from Chrispin – about beekeeping and the best hives to use, more about fish farming, about plants to use as hedges for gardens. And I also learned more about how he had developed his own style of training and printed his own training materials. He had lots of stories to tell about development projects that went badly when the wrong people were chosen as lead farmers (pastors, for example, who just wanted access to a motorbike to do their church ministry).

We made one significant stop on the 8-hour drive back to Arusha. On Monday, Chrispin had pointed out a strange grove of trees along the road. He had mentioned that it was the work of an old man, who had started planting a tree for every major world event, sometime in the late 60s. He had visited the place 15 years ago and had spoken to the man and noted the signs, commemorating the war with Idi Amin, the resignation of Nixon, and many events involving Mwalimu Nyerere. So, we stopped to see if there was anything there now. At first, we just found a few broken and rusty signs, but then some children arrived to tell us that Mzee was coming. We could not believe he was still alive! He must have been 90 or so, very thin, and lean, with an Islamic prayer cap on his head and a long robe. It is inspiring to see a man like him, with the imagination and energy to plant trees and recognize history as it is happening. We left, hoping that perhaps one of his grandchildren might feel inspired to protect and emulate this legacy.

I enjoyed the middle part of the drive home when Chrispin let me take the wheel and experience the sharp corners driving up through the mountains towards the agricultural area in Babati. After that, admittedly, the drive got a little long through the dry plains around Tarangire. We made it home around 8 pm, and just in time for a later dinner and time to catch up with family.

Bonus photos

fish pond at school

Dodoma church architecture