Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Monday, January 25, 2010

Growing and a-growin'

Our garden is flourishing! I've got the dimensions and price info for some tanks or rainwater-collection wells (water harvesting!). As it turns out, the most acute problem in the rural areas right now is the fact that there is no sustainable water source.

We've had several complaints about women not having water to wash their children, they have heavy dehydration because of the intense heat, and several wells have simply run dry.

How can we help on the health side of things if these people don't have water to drink??

This is where we come in.

We have drawn out some ideas for large wells that will cost around 2500 Meticais ($90 USD). The plan is to see what locals can afford to put forward to invest in these sustainable tanks in order to participate in a year-round growing for their small home farms.

After finding a great website that calculates volume, here's what our tanks would look like:

Width: 80" (203.2cm)
Height: 84" (213.36cm)
Depth: 80" (203.2cm)
Your tank's volume is approximately 537600 cubic inches or 2327.27 U.S. gallons, which is approximately 9053.09 liters.

(When I get my computer back, I'll show you what this looks like in real life :)


I have found that it's incredibly more successful if we work with people who are willing to invest a small amount and we match what they can put forth or figure out how to find small payments for the remainder of the cost. With this small investment from their side, they find a sense of ownership over what happens and do not simply expect us to do everything for them.

With many of the aid programs that I've seen in the area, they do not remain self-sustaining because once funds run out, there's no way of any project continuing. The people that relied on the aid are suddenly frustrated and angry about why the money is gone from whatever it did beforehand. I'd be, too.

With our farm, our big costs are:

1) Water ($45/mo)
2) Labor (1 farmer)
3) Seeds ($1/packet of seeds)
4) Tools ($75 rake, shovel, hoe, etc.)

That aside, we are hoping to sell our vegetables to the local peoples in order to put those funds back into their own start-up farms.

Their home farms will be working on a microfinance basis, where we buy all of the foundational tools and do all of the teaching about how to grow. Afterward, they can sell their produce within the community, or they can simply use it for food. We, however, expect that they pay enough to cover all future seed costs ($1/packet of seed).

I'm hoping to have a "tool lending" program based at our church where people can come and "borrow gardening tools" for their gardening work. Our job is to check on the maintenance of the tools and see that they get returned in a timely fashion. We may have to invest in more tools and perhaps a wheelbarrow for borrow.

These low cost ideas, we hope, will produce results. Our primary endeavor right now is to get the manual of growing written.

I have 4 chapters of text I'm working on about how to plan for an year round garden to Mozambican environmental standards. The caveat to training locals is that they must be able to have a sustainable water source. If they are not interested in finding water that will both water their gardens, and if need be, can be filtered (traditional rock and dirt filtration) for drinking purposes, then we really do not know what more we can do.

When I first arrived, I thought, 'If you hold classes for preventative health education, they will come...' However, what I've found is that they're much too busy with everything else going on in their lives to have a few hours per week to learn things they really have no clue will really pay off.

The poverty and sustainability issues have always been raised, even with low-maintainence, quick-fix health initiatives. I've created little packages of rehydration fluid for when we meet up with families that have kids sick with diarrhea. Unfortunately, when I leave, no one will be here to make up the packets. There are no simple ways to get small baggies, a bag of sugar and salt in the rural areas. It's much to difficult and expensive to have to travel to get all of these ingredients, even if it will aid their child's dehydrated state.

Project Rx is seeking sustainable solutions that can be adopted by all community members, regardless of their socio-economic situation. It's been incredibly difficult to find these solutions, BUT we are really finding that with small home farms we can yield results in sustained nutrition, microfinance opportunities for selling marketable veggies, and we can find a sustainable water source through these water collection tanks!

Oh, the things we have learned and hope to produce in the coming months. Please keep us in your prayers as we get everything written and prepare for our Fall crops in March!! We hope to have families lined up to get tanks ready and have gardens planned for the coming season! ANNND, we get to harvest our first round of veggies then!!

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Progressive progress

More changes! So, the job is an indefinite no-go and the project will go full-boar, full-time! We have decided to change our timeline to what was more like what we began with.

The extent of the project will go through June until July and we have set our hopes on our educational front to go door-to-door with our information and kind intentions for better farming and health practices in-house.

We will be working on water collection projects for subsistence farming and the future of the area. After collecting some information on the area with the locals, I have found that it will be relatively cheap ($65-70) to build a small "paço", or water-collection well per family. This one-time investment will allow farmers to use their water to farm in their dry land where water is very difficult to come by. Currently all water sources must be traveled to, often more than one mile, to collect water and it is scarce during the hot summer time, where lots of wells have been reported to run dry.

There is no preparation for the dry season and the plants that had been planted to be watered. The people in the area simply let the plants grow and hope they get sufficient rainfall to water their crops. The problem is, it is not raining enough to see the plants survive, and their return on initial investment collapses completely.

This is where we can come in. We can organize these planting structures and collect water to plan for the dry season and organize crops to see a better yield. :)

Now, it seems we have lost a fair amount of our cucumber crop. Because of my poor farming (rather, my lack of knowledge of cucumber worms), a fair amount of our crop has gone to beetle larvae that wants to eat our corn and okra as well. The growing process is so futile for such plants and we're learning about how to plan for the future of these problems. You can never predict pests when you don't know how things will grow. (What a fantastic life picture!)

We will continue to progress and see what comes. We can now figure how to plan for the future of the area to start with a foundation of a healthy food source and small source of income for those who participate in our program.

Project Rx is full-boar once again! Though the timeline stays short, the work remains the same and we can do what we can in the time being.

Thank you for your prayers and continued support. It's making an incredible difference. :)

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

O Proyecto Continua. The Project Continues. :)

Project Rx will be continuing with the church community, with the garden and with farming education throughout the village of Machava. After much deliberation with the church leadership, we decided it is best to proceed as planned. The major change, however, is that the Project will not be a full time endeavor.

We found that the planning and implementation of the project is highly dependent upon the time frames of the local people and the local church leadership and they are currently spread too thin to help out with the Project goals on a daily basis. We have decided to make it a part-time course and extend the length of the project in order to be able to achieve our goals.

In order to extend the length of the project, I am in the midst of pursuing a job opportunity offered to me before I left to Cape Town. We have decided I can work throughout the week, take certain days off early to teach and work in the garden, work the Saturdays they have available and reconvene with everyone on Sundays. :) This schedule is much more appropriate for the goals of education and farming, to allow independence of the local people to implement farming practices.

As for the health education goals of Project Rx, we are focusing on the production of a health education manual for teachers and students. I will be designing the materials under a timetable that we will have a better idea of once I do or do not have a job. The implementation of the health courses as originally intended have been deemed inconsistent with the education and interest level of the local people. We have decided we need more time to think about our education materials in order to create courses that children and adults will learn from.

For everyone presently working for the church, it is best that we set a more regular schedule in order to see that everyone is working collectively to accomplish all of our respective goals. We are presently quite content with the way things are going now, given that we had time to reflect on what our goals are and come to a better conclusion about how we can proceed. :)

God is doing such great things! I'm so confident in where things are going. An air of lightness is upon us. We are all continuing in the direction we are all in agreement with. =) Praise be.

Your prayers and thoughts have been everything. Thank you for your dedication. It does not go unappreciated--in fact, it's our backbone.

I've been promised my computer back by mid-January! Finally! I promise to have pictures by then. Promise, promise, promise.