"They took it all, from that point just over there, in 1979," Inge Brown said, lifting one hand from her walking stick to point toward a barbed wire fence. Beyond the fence, dense, tropical weeds and grass grew thickly. "They said they were going to build a highway through my land, and so the government took it under eminent domain."

"Did they give you anything for your land?" I asked.

"Oh, no, don't be foolish," Inge replied, chuckling ruefully. Her English still carries a hint of her native Germany, though she moved here, to the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, in 1933, to join her British husband. Her husband passed away in the early 1970s, and Inge, now 96, has lived here alone ever since. "I didn't know what I was going to do. We made our living from our chickens, but when they took the land, there wasn't enough space to get by on that kind of work. Imagine! I had no savings, no way of making a living. I had nothing. I was seventy years old and had to start from scratch. And do you see any highway here, twenty-five years later?"

I shook my head. The yard was surrounded by scrub and, farther off, eucalyptus trees.

"I waited for them to build their highway, but no! Instead I watched as those MPs built mansion after mansion all around here," Inge explained, referring to the members of parliament who no doubt became quite wealthy from the transaction.

In the end, Inge converted two of the chicken coops to guest cottages, which she rents out to the itinerant aid workers who pass through the city in a continual stream, earning just enough to pay for a security guard and the groceries.

Though not a woman who would ever feel sorry for herself, Inge loves to tell stories as she putters about the property, checking on the flowers and the few chickens who still peck around the yard. "I'll die before I give up this little piece of land I have left," she stated solemnly, and it was clear she meant it.

Africa is not all AIDS and war, as it sometimes comes across in newspaper coverage. An article last spring in the Washington Post sought to counteract that doom-and-gloom image, explaining how the stock markets in some African countries are booming; how Botswana's national savings rate is second only to Singapore's; how hard-working farmers navigate seemingly unpassable roads, committed to get their crops to market. I am thankful for coverage that complicates the pictures we often get of Africa, but when I mull plopping my savings into the Ghanaian stock exchange, I think of Inge Brown. Yes, there are a lot of hopeful economic opportunities in Africa. But, in many cases, they are not secure.

That sense of security -- that when you buy something, as many of us have done quite a bit over this holiday season, it's yours -- is easy to take for granted. Though I don't mean to come across as an apologist for unfettered capitalism, it is nice to be able to put food on the table, send your kids to school, perhaps even save a little for the future, and those things all depend on a fair system of property rights. The Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto's book The Mystery of Capital (2000), shows how the inability of the world's poor to gain title to their assets means that they are trapped in poverty. Never able to make their resources fungible, it becomes nearly impossible to make more out of what's there. All your energies go into protecting the little that you have. At any point, you could be evicted, like the tens of thousands of residents of the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe, whose homes the government razed over the course of the past year, in an effort to get rid of supporters of the opposition party.

The idea behind something like the Heifer Project is that by giving someone a right to an animal, something that can't be taken from them, they'll be able to make that asset grow into something much larger. I've been working with the Rural Development Institute, an organization with a similar goal. RDI focuses primarily on land rights and helping countries develop systems of land ownership that are fair, transparent, and accessible to all. Much of their work has been in India, among the rural landless. Once people gain access to even a tiny plot, they are able to grow enough food for their family, plus some to sell, and even plant a few teak trees, which are a great investment. Though teak saplings can be purchased for very little, when the fast-growing trees mature in about ten years, they fetch hundreds of dollars each. We're not talking fancy, expensive solutions here, just making the rules a little bit fairer.

While in Rwanda a few years ago, I met a man named Pascal Gashumba. Pascal has lived near the top of a hillside in the town of Byumba for nearly his whole life, on a farm that has been in his family for generations. Pascal lost some seventy-five members of his extended family during the genocide. As we walked around his farm, he could point, "Over there, that is where they killed my mother"; "By those trees, my brother was killed"; and on and on, seemingly endlessly. Despite these memories, Pascal decided that this was his home, and he would not be uprooted. After spending a couple of years in a refugee camp in Congo following the genocide, he moved back home to rebuild his family house. He lived under a tarp in the yard while he built the house, and when it was done, he held a party, inviting all the hillside's inhabitants. At the party, a few of his neighbors came forward, leading a cow. Though all much poorer than Pascal, they had pooled their resources to purchase this gift to welcome him back, a symbolic offering in recognition of the losses his family had endured, some of them perpetrated by these very neighbors, or their relatives. Pascal cites that cow as the gift that enabled them all to begin anew.

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