Halima Athumani is a Uganda-based journalist.
This is her first story for the magazine. Jasper
Doest focuses on stories that explore the relation-
ship between the natural world and humankind.some Ugandans, “especially for children who are
poor and are not able to afford sources of proteins
like meat,” Malinga says.
By 2019, after eight years of experiments,
Nyeko and his collaborators cracked the code
of keeping and breeding bush crickets. Wire-
mesh and Plexiglas cages, a variety of grains
to eat, and damp sand did the trick. Next: field
tests. The pandemic delayed plans to roll out a
pilot project with farmers in 2020, but now it’s
set to start in early 2022. The researchers have
selected 99 villages in the central Ugandan dis-
trict of Mityana to participate, with the goal that
it’ll catch on from there.
“The farmers we shall train shall then train
other farmers,” Malinga says.
They also plan to test out a porridge-nsenene
mix for schoolchildren.
On the hill in Harugongo, Islam is back. A
mask, pants, and long sleeves protect him from
the trap’s bright light—and the painful Nairobi
flies. It’s a few days into the 2021 fall season, and
he’s caught about three sacks’ worth—two fewer
than this time the previous year. Like others, he
took out loans to stay in business and worries how
he’ll repay them. “You struggle for plan B now,”
he says. “You will have to go and hunt somewhere
else [for] money, not in grasshoppers.” jTHE CRICKET CATCHERS 131