The Game Plan*

Now that we have the few months ahead of us with no interruptions, we are full-force in planning out the rest of my time here.

Our garden is at the top of our list of things to do. Below is the plan that we have come up with about how the garden will grow and look on the property, overall. :)

Above is the map of the property.

This is the farm portion. If flipped clockwise, this is what we're filling into the bright green area on the map.

The garden is the first task we're really trying to tackle based on the time-sensitivity of the Spring season. We’re trying to capitalize on the warm weather that we get here year-round. Hopefully we can have 4-seasons of crop production. We should have at least three rounds of good vegetables produced.

Our second most important task is our upcoming holiday programs. There is currently no real coordinator of the children’s programs, (even though there are 300+ children who attend every Sunday for songs, a story and biscuits). Project Rx gets to be inventive about all of the wonderful things we can do for the holidays.

I have since been in charge of Holiday festivities, which I don’t mind one bit. I’ve arranged a game of “Feliz Natal Bingo” for over 500 kids, some great holiday print outs for them to color. More importantly, we can give kids at home kits for their ailments, such rehydration mixes for common diarrhea, band-aids for cuts, and soap for everyday washing. Though these may seem very small, most children do not come into contact with any of these items regularly.

Each of the items will be paired visual aides and a small lesson on how to use each item. One thing that has become very clear, is that the level in which we have to describe most things has to boil down, often to nothing more than a picture or a short statement. Anything more than that and we may run into situations of illiteracy, the difficulty of understanding complex language, or confusion about what the main purpose of the item is. The level in which we have to speak to the community speaks to our capacity to be able to reach people at all levels.

This brings me to my third task at hand, which is designing the health curriculum for children ages 3-7. I have been designing a health curriculum to allow teachers to simply aide young children how to live healthier lives, tailored to the community’s environment, resources and lifestyle.

I am clearly no expert in Shangaan culture, however the lesson plans are there to allow teachers to learn their students and teach a lifestyle of healthier living, starting with children of a young age. This will be later adapted for older students and finally adults. I’ve completed two of seven units in our health curriculum. I can complete the lessons on a rolling basis as we evaluate how well the first few lessons will go.

The teachers, (who have also vowed to be servants of the church), are eager to learn new things and have a better idea of what they can teach to students. Because there is little direction at this point, they are very excited to have more direction and a more focused task. They have been extremely helpful and supportive of the work that I’ve been preparing. They keep asking for more and want to know how they can help.

Although they have full schedules each day, starting with their early morning prayers at 5am, they are very excited to participate in something new!

So, it’s yet another exciting time for all of the potential we have in the coming months.

The obstacles we face are mostly in the form of communication. This is a true test of whether or not we can apply all of our knowledge from all sides of the world. To me, it’s not worth a Stanford education if we cannot communicate with our friends in Machava, Mozambique. It will be a great time to reflect on what we can accomplish and what we will fail at, indefinitely.

To recap (+ add a bit):

- Seeds are purchased and we’re on the brink of planting our garden! The land has transformed so drastically in the past months due to all of the hard work of Papá Sebastião, myself, and Eric, (my Korean bro).

- We’re looking forward to the holiday’s to start the children up with an intro to health practices and lots of fun times for the holidays.

- I’m going to Cape Town for Christmas! I’ll be working with African Leadership partners to present what has been done here and see how we can start looking at implementing the health curriculum into the South African preschool program.

- Teacher training is our next task followed by preparing all materials for our first few health lessons. This should be ready by December with all of our Christmas festivities!

*sorry for the weird formatting. I cut and pasted from my word doc. :-/

Project Rx Garden Begins!

We are so floored to have started to break ground on our community garden! We have two permanent farmers, hired to oversee the mini-farm we are cultivating. They have been busy working in between construction of a new church building and preparing the land by hand--literally.

The farmers hack at the ground using hand-hoe/hand-axe like tool. It makes for back breaking work. They are very accustomed to these short-handle tools. We went to purchase new tools from the ones below, which were necessary to replace the overly used tools that made for a lot of effort with little result. Unfortunately, our lead farmer disliked the long-handle hoe, because he said he "didn't get enough power out of it". He was used to his bent-over posture, hacking at the ground. I was in no way going to change his opinion on the matter.

We, I should say "Americans", are so accustomed to our long-handle tools, it seems crazy that we would bend over and bend our backs to swing a pick. I have even begun to read articles of the adversity Western organizations have faced for trying to introduce our Western tools.



Staying on the vein of introducing new things, I got the group together to explain our plans for on-site composting. We have gotten our large family and the community members that live on the church property to begin collecting all of their compostable waste and taking it to our compost pile. We will be using locally purchased chicken manure (strume, in Portuguese, one of the words that has taken me a century to remember) and the excess grasses and leaves to start it out. It's so great to use small ideas to produce delicious and nutritious veggies.

So far, we plan on growing cabbage, corn, beans, cucumber, onion and pumpkin. The community members decided collectively what they would like to have. We are still brainstorming what will be done with this food once it's full grown.

We're thinking we can start a small microcredit program, allowing community members to sell the veggies in the market. We're also thinking that we could use some of the food for expecting mothers lacking proper nutrition, for the orphans adopted by the church or for the children's new health education program.

So many ideas!! I'll let you know what turns out!

THIS IS ALL HAPPENING BECAUSE OF YOUR SUPPORT!