That home extends its influence out to sea. At the end of a long rock jetty, Ibrahim Mohammed Ibrahim peels off his shirt, winds it around his head, then steps into the water to check his net. He wades chest deep along it, feeling the mesh for fish and turning up a nice barracuda and a jack. He cleans them on the rocks, plunging them repeatedly, almost reverently, in the water.
Since planting began, Hirgigo’s fishermen have started to catch small species such as mullet. Ibrahim put the equation simply: “No mangroves, no mullet.” And the little fish that make the mangroves their home attract bigger, predatory fish—the kind that snag in Ibrahim’s net and sell for good prices in the Massawa market.
In a pen on the outskirts of the village, a flock of sheep crunches mangrove propagules as if they were apples. Sato is using these animals to fine-tune the livestock-rearing side of the project. He has found that mangrove leaves and propagules, though highly nutritious, are not a complete stock food. Fish meal, which Sato is having made locally from fish processing, seems to provide the missing nutrients.
Outside the pen, donkeys nibble in the dust. The stubble of grass is so miserable and sparse it doesn’t provide even the faintest green tinge to the parched earth. The nearby houses are nothing more than dusty improvisations of flattened iron, bits of cloth, and scraps of wood. Sato dreams of seeing a livestock pen beside every house. “In this country, a few goats can be the beginning of an empire,” he says. “I want to give everyone this chance.” Who would have imagined it: The mangrove, foundation of empires.
The town of Massawa recently celebrated the 15th anniversary of its liberation from Ethiopian forces—a David-and-Goliath struggle (as Eritreans tell it) in which the pride of the Ethiopian Navy was bested by a ragtag band of Eritreans in speedboats. A sign on a café shows a soldier in heroic pose and the slogan “Able to do what can’t be done.”
Out on the mudflats another old soldier is attempting the impossible: turning the tide of poverty by growing mangroves. The gardeners of Manzanar would be proud.
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(责任编辑：威展小王)
