Am a journalist and radio programme producer in mang’elete f.m station. I have been producing and presenting health, environment and HIV and AIDS programmes. It was on my normal process of collecting programme materials when I met this lady, Honorable Agnes Ndetei. She was once the area member of parliament in late 1980s, but people had almost forgotten her, because there were roamers that after she was beaten out of the seat she went abroad but fortunately I came to know that she was just within and was doing a project of conserving the environment.
I had booked an appointment to meet her so that she can give a message on environment conservation. When I reached her homestead, she was preparing moringa powder with the help of other two ladies but I did not know at once what they where doing because when she saw us, she ran to welcome and volunteered to push my wheelchair to her seed nursery so that we can safe time.
She had more than 6000 seedlings and to my astonishment the moringa seedlings were about three-quarter of the 6000. When I asked her why, it’s when she told me that when she was beaten out of politics she was sick, and then she went to seek medication abroad. After testing she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through chemotherapy and radiation, but she did not trust it, so she decided to seek help from herbalists.
The first one whom she approached had no solution but knew about moringa oliefera but he never knew whether it can be found in our country Kenya, but in Nigeria. To her disappointment she had no money to travel to Nigeria, so she called her friend who was a lecturer in one of universities in Kenya and asked him whether he knew about this tree called moringa oliefera. In fact she could believe the explanation of her friend who was telling her that the tree she was asking was just in their parent’s shamba but she never new.
After a length interview on what she is doing and planning to do in future with this moringa, I was very marveled and decided to join her and make this tree known, used and planted by the community for their own consumption and as a cash crop.
I did not react right a way, I wanted to test it first. I had two pressure soles that had disturbed for three good years, so I asked her to give me one packet of the processed moringa powder. Believe it or not, I applied it to my soles and within two weeks they were gone!
After one month I visited her again to open the whole idea to her. It was not easy to convince her to accept my idea of publicizing the importance of this tree, but after a long discussion she agreed to come live in our radio station for about one hour so that we get know what people will respond.
After that live program things changed drastically, many people started coming out with different illnesses to try this moringa powder and the out come was very promising. This made SOLACE CBO which by then was known as SOLACE SELF HELP GROUP and which was planting and processing moringa powder very famous.
