Water leaks into the house, spilling down the wall and flowing onto the floor, adding to the small stream that cuts through the bedroom and sitting room in this small mud hut. Mary Martin, the hut’s owner, is surprisingly upbeat. “I’m not happy about the hole in the wall, but at least I can afford to fix it,” she says.

Mary, 37, who lives in Kenya’s Nyanza province, is not new to hardship. Her parents died years ago and her only two siblings both passed away within the past three years. In 2003 her husband died of AIDS, leaving Mary to raise their three children on her own. With little formal education and no assets other than the land on which they live plus a few animals, there was only one way for Mary to provide for her family: farming.

With declining harvests over the last five years, however, even the family’s most basic needs were hard to meet; her children ate less each day, medical and school bills were constant concerns and repairs or improvements to the house were simply not affordable. Last year was particularly bad – Mary only harvested one sack of maize.

The small harvest, though, was certainly not a result of indifference; Mary wakes up each morning at five, prepares her children for school, heads to the field at six, returns a few hours later to prepare lunch for her three children and then continues her work in the field until they return from school.

Desperate to grow more, Mary was excited when she first heard about One Acre Fund. Her excitement grew when she attended a One Acre Fund community meeting last summer. “I wanted to join right away to grow more – to have more food for my family.”

Although this season’s harvest is still a month away, Mary face brightens when she talks about her maize. “All my neighbors are very jealous,” she says. It’s difficult to predict the size of her harvest, but both Mary and the One Acre Fund staff member for her area expect her field to produce at least three to four times more maize than last season. Mary knows things are not perfect – she has to repair the hole in her wall and recently took one of her children to the hospital for malaria – but her improved harvests give her hope. When asked if she will work with One Acre Fund next season, her response is pragmatic and direct: “I have to – my family needs to eat.”