The word , Swahili for “medicine,” threads through Francis Marete Mboroki’s speech as he describes the chemicals he spent decades spraying across his small farm on the fertile slopes of Mount Kenya. They were sold as the tools of progress: modern seeds, bigger harvests, prosperity.dawa Even as European and US regulators banned or restricted these chemicals at home, Mboroki kept spraying them, unaware they could be poisoning him. Today his doctors believe those pesticides caused the throat cancer