This is our richest farming household. When we began it was headed by an energetic middle-aged farmer who died, rather suddenly, in July 2019, from a heart condition. His widow (pictured) became our Diarist. He had been educated to grade 8, she to grade 4. She lives with her parents-in-law, children, and a divorced daughter and her child, in her husband's family home, a big compound with a large house, stabling for cows, and a row of nine small tin-walled housing units to let (usually all occupied and paying rent). They have about two acres of cropland, some of it share-cropped out although, more recently, some is lying fallow because farm inputs, especially labour, has become more costly.
The family has, for a long time, been involved in an expensive legal dispute over some of the land: it has now been judged in their favour but at considerable and continuing expense. For some years, staring 2016, they lost possession of the land to the other claimants.
Their son has been in Dubai since 2013, working as a driver. He came back when his father died, bringing cash, then got delayed, partly because of Covid, and didn't get back to Dubai until 2022. He had to renegotiate his work status, and paid a migration agent again. He was not able to resume remittances until early 2024.
Chart 01 shows the more prosperous period, with higher transaction levels and more 'surplus' months, up until the husband's death and Covid, and then a much quieter period. But they have never been really poor: in 2020 she used a large inheritance to make a gift to found a madrassa.
