Agriculture at Tumaini

Hello, As I mentioned earlier, one of the things we were working on at the school was setting up a parent teacher association. The aim is the get more of the parents involved with the school and helping with new initiatives around the school. The parents are super enthusiastic and elected 6 people to be on the PTA. One of the many things that the PTA is to work on is the agricultural program for the school. After a couple meetings, we determined that we would like to have two parts to the agriculture program. Part 1 is an income generating project which is meant to sustain Part 2. Part 1 is growing maize and soya beans. Right now, they are planning to just sell the maize and the soya beans, maybe sometime in the future they can look at other things like grinding the maize into flour or making soya milk etc. Part 2 is to grow vegetables to be used in the school lunch program. Right now, maize and beans are donated by each parent who can for the lunch program. This allows all the children the have at least one meal a day. If the PTA is able to grow some more vegetables, more variety can be added to their diet which will be good. We have started with growing sukuma wiki (kale). In the last couple weeks before I left the village, it was finally planting season. We were busy busy busy! Here we are planting the maize and soya beans. Here I am getting right into it! Planting is way easier than mudding. We had a good team working on the planting, so in no time we had planted this whole field. Here is our planting crew...we decided to go into the market for some lunch when we were done the project.

hehe... I couldn't resist taking a photo of the menu on the wall. Beans and chapati for 20 ksh... that's about 25 cents!

I can't wait to get back to the village to see how these crops are doing!