I have wanted to own my own piece of land so that I could use it for farming during the rainy season but unfortunately I have not been able to afford to buy one. But that was always my intention because I would manage to grow my own crops during the rainy season which would help me spend less money when it came to matters of buying food.

GiveDirectly has completely transitioned my life for the better because before I used to spend so much money just to borrow a piece of land in order to farm but now I have my own through the funds I received which enabled me to purchase land. This would have not been so were it not for GiveDirectly so I am very grateful because it would have taken me years to even manage to do it on my own.

After I received the money I saw it as an opportunity to ahead and buy that piece of land that I always wanted because I did not have my own which forced me to pay some of my neighbours to give a portion of their land so that I would farm which made me spend a lot of money and yet the land I was given was small and I could never own it. Therefore I took the money and bought two acres of land for KES 50,000 since one acre was KES 25,000. As for what I was left with which was around KES 3,150, I bought a sack of maize for KES 3,000 so that we would at least have food in the house and the remaining KES 150 I used it as fare to transport the maize back home.

On receiving the first transfer, I was so happy that everyone in the household could not doubt the excitement I had at that moment. I was home with all the family members when the good news broke to us. Everyone wanted to confirm with the message I had received since just telling them that it was the transfer from GiveDirectly never seemed true to them. My husband had to confirm also, and since we had all plans in place, we had to plan on withdrawing the flowing day before spending on our budgeted items.

Even though we are enjoying the already streaming income from the two small businesses we started, completion of the payment of our piece of land is the biggest difference in my daily life. We had been leasing other pieces to till since the small one we had was not enough. Having completed the payment will allow us to start farming in it, and I am hopeful that we will be able to realize a better income and enough foodstuff from the farm produce.

After receiving the first transfer, our top priority was to spend part of the transfer on obtaining the necessary pieces of equipment to start some business - one to be operated by my husband and the other one that I will be running. My husband had been hoping to start a barbershop but the scarce resources could not allow him to initiate it. On receiving the first transfer, I spent KES 17000 on obtaining a solar panel, wet battery, and a shaving machine that are currently in use. On the other side, I ventured into the milk buying and selling business from the village where I spent at least KES 1000 every day on collecting and selling at a profit. These two businesses have been helpful in the past few days as we have been making an appreciable amount of income. With the plans that we also had, we needed to complete the payment of a piece of land that we still owed the owner KES 25000. We had been living on a small piece from my husband's parents, and we saw it good to buy our own so that we can expand our farming practices. I also managed to obtain a comfortable new piece of furniture at KES 6500 for my newly constructed house that was still missing good seats, and the last amount went to buying foodstuff that we are currently using in our household. I am glad that even though we still have a lot to do, the first transfer brought a lot of changes to our household.