Irene’s garden is struggling because of her landlord

Irene is one of the most successful composters in Shield of Faith and she likes to grow lots of vegetables. A mother of three children, Irene has been with the program since the very beginning in 2021.

Irene’s garden is typically very beautiful, but when we visited Stella and I both felt that the plants did not look well. The reason, said Irene, was that the landlord had put a new cement wall up where she normally kept her plants. She was then told to move the boxes where she was growing vegetables because the landlord felt that they were taking up too much space along the new wall. This forced Irene to move the planter boxes to the opposite wall, reducing the amount of sunlight they received. This hurt the plants, particularly the kale.

Stella offered Irene boxes that were smaller and could be put along the cement wall. In our second visit to Irene, eight out of the 10 boxes were lined up along the wall, but Irene had been forced to remove the other two along with her previous boxes. Irene had also replaced all the dying vegetables with spinach, onion, and garlic. They looked healthy.

Landlords and tiny spaces challenge all of the women in the program. The land in Kibera is not privately owned but rented out to landlords, who are wealthy individuals. They charge a high rent, make whatever changes they want and have veto power over any design changes.

This creates obvious difficulties for the Shield of Faith composters and means that a successful garden can be taken down at any moment, just because the landlord says so. When this happens, the women can find themselves with even less space than before.