Hello, I am Njeri Mwangi and this is Dust Road Dispatches, the show that goes to the places the news vans drive past and stays long enough to understand them. I grew up on a smallholding near Nyeri, so this first episode is close to home. Above the town of Kerugoya, four hundred families pick tea every morning and deliver it to a factory that has not paid them since March. Six months of leaf, no money. I spent a week there, walking the rows at five in the morning, sitting through a committee meeting that ran four hours, and listening on the verandas afterwards where the real arguments happen. The whole episode turns on one question: do they keep delivering. By the end, they vote. You will hear the sound of that room. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.