The man who farms water.

• Author: Lancaster, Brad
• Position: Zephania Phiri Maseko's swales

While traveling through Southern Africa in the summer of 1995, I heard of a man who was farming water. I set out to find him without much of an idea of where I was going. Soon I was packed in a colorful old bus roaring through the southern countryside of Zimbabwe at about 30 miles per hour. The scenery was beautiful with rolling hills of yellow grass upon red earth and small thickets of twisting, sometimes umbrella-like trees. I faded in and out of sleep until nine hours later when we were in Zimbabwe's driest region. We crested a pass of low lying semidesert vegetation to see below us a vast high veldt prairie of undulating hills covered with dry grass and often capped with barren outcroppings of granite.

Trees were sparse. I was reminded of the open grasslands of southeastern Arizona. In fact, all was covered by a wonderful expanse of clear blue sky, as one would see in the arid southwestern United States. The bus crept down into the dry grassland and stopped in the small rural town of Zvishavane. This was the area where the water farmer lived. As the sun was setting, I walked off to find a spot to lay my sleeping bag and went to sleep.

In the morning, I hitched a ride with the local director of CARE International. She took me to a row of single-story houses. One of these was the simple office of the Zvishavane Water Resources Project. There on the porch, reading the Bible, sat the water farmer.

As my ride came to a stop, he sprung up with a huge smile and warm greetings. Here at last was Mr. Zephania Phiri Maseko. When he learned of how far I had traveled, he burst into a wonderful laugh. He told me that lately visitors from all over the globe seemed to be pouring in almost daily. Nonetheless, each one is an unexpected surprise.

In the Landrover bouncing over worn and eroded dirt roads toward his farm, Mr. Phiri was talking, laughing and gesturing-endless streams of poetic analogies and stories. The best story of all was his own.

In 1964, he was fired from his job on the railway for being politically naive against the White Rhodesian government. He was told by the government that he would never work again in any position.

Having to support a family of eight, Mr. Phiri turned to the only two things he had, a three hectare family landholding and the Bible. He didn't use the Bible only for spiritual guidance or inspiration, he also used it as a gardening manual. Reading Genesis, he saw that everything Adam and Eve needed was provided by the Garden of Eden. "So," thought Mr. Phiri, "I must create my own Garden of Eden." Yet he also realized that Adam and Eve had the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in their region, while he didn't have even an ephemeral creek. "So," he thought, "I must also create my own rivers." He has done both.

His farm is on the slope of a hill facing north-northeast (providing good sun exposure to the site, as it is in the...