I have a new goal of starting to keep livestock. We have been staying in a small piece of land where we do not have a title and this prevented us from investing in things such as livestock keeping. However with the piece of land that we bought we now have plans of keeping livestock. This is an option as it is one of the main economic activities that we engage in here and is something that will enable us actualize some of the things that we intend to in the near future like payment of school fees for our children and other needs of our family.

In my opinion, GiveDirectly did very well by not only giving us the money as grants but also giving us the freedom to choose how we were going to spend the money. This gave everyone an opportunity to choose how best the money would be utilized to reap maximum benefits from it.

I used part of my recent transfer to clear an outstanding bill for a piece of land that we had bought and used the remaining amount to fence our compound. We have been living in no man's land for a long time hence the decision to buy our own piece of land where we can settle without having to worry of who might tell us to move away from where we currently stay. The fencing of the compound was informed by the fact that I have plans of keeping poultry and they have to be confined to avoid external conflicts.

It was around 11 pm and I was not asleep since I am not an early-to-bed person. Suddenly, as I was going about with my household duties, I heard my phone ringing notifying me of a new message. I wondered what the message was all about since it was quite late. I decided to check the contents, and to my surprise, I found that the SMS was indicating that I had received KES 55000 in my mobile money account. I was so happy on seeing it that I couldn't keep the good news to myself. I immediately went to wake up my husband who was fast asleep. I told him about the good news as I showed him the SMS. He was so happy on hearing this and we couldn't believe that we had such a huge sum of money with us. In the morning, it was celebration all over the village. That was the happiest day to us.

The transfer has brought a very big difference in our lives as a family. With the transfer, we were able to buy enough food and some household items that have lasted us for a while. We have hence not spent a lot on food and as a result, we have managed to save some of the money from the business.

We spent the first transfer money on various things that are important to us. I have been suffering from tooth cavities and hence we had agreed that upon getting the transfers, I was going to seek medical attention. So, we took out KES 15000 that I used in doing so. Apart from the health expenses, we also took out KES 7000 that we used in buying food, and some KES 2000 that we used in buying clothes for the children. The remaining amount of money, we added to the little that we still had from a loan that we had borrowed from a SACCO. We then used the money to buy a piece of land. We bought a point of an acre. We live near a town center and we usually rear chickens. There is too much theft of chickens and other things going on in the place. The theft has become a menace, I hence thought that it is better to buy a piece of land in the rural area where there is not much theft. Also, the area that we live in has no title deed, it is a place that the government moved us to since they wanted to construct a hospital in the place where we used to live in. We hence fear that we might be chased away one day. We didn't have money to buy the piece of land. I practice subsistence small-scale farming while my husband has a small electronics business. The money that we make most of it usually goes to the payment of school fees for our three children and two in secondary school. We are hence so much thankful to GiveDirectly for their help.