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!!
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