A PEPFAR Grant and Training

My first grant went through! It's only for about $180, but it went through just fine, so next weekend we are going to sell fruit tree seedlings in the village (orange, lemon, passion fruit, custard apple, guava and a few more). We are buying them for the equivalent of 50 cents and selling them to villagers who attend a seminar for 5 cents each. We're doing a seminar on how to care for seedlings properly, so that hopefully they will all survive. The grant is PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), so I had to make the project relate to AIDS as much as possible. There's a group that takes care of orphans by providing them with a plot of land to farm and seeds when they graduate from the 7th grade, and they get to order seedlings first. Then the seminar will include a little spiel about how fruit relates to proper nutrition, and how proper nutrition is so important for people with diseases like AIDS. I'm excited.

We are in Iringa for AIDS education training, so today we went to an elementary school and taught two lessons. It was surprising to me how much the kids already know. I think what is really needed are more life skills lessons, where they learn and practice skills like saying "no" assertively, having positive role models and developing goals. I hadn't really thought much about how important those things are until recently. I can see how much easier it would be to do the right thing in a tough situation if you'd done a skit about it in class, or if you had some lines prepared to say to someone who was pressuring you. It is a lot like the DARE program from elementary school (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). My counterpart and I are thinking about how we are going to teach when we get back to the village.














It is nice to be in town and get things like cheese and chocolate, but it will be nice to get back to my little farm!

HAPPY NEW YEAR

The past month has been so busy, with our in-service training, a visit from my friend Rafael on his winter vacation from Nova Scotia, and now a President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief seminar. We are now allowed to start projects, so I am working on trying to get fruit tree seedlings to plant before we get too far into the rainy season.

Rafael was a terrific guest; we didn't actually do any of the typical touristy things. Instead we spent the majority of the time in my village, meeting villagers (a few of whom spoke English with him, a few of whom rattled on in Swahili or even Kihehe heedless of his confusion). He even tagged along to another subvillage where I was doing evaluations of permaculture seminars, and got a tour of some farmers' fields. My friend, who owns a little shop where she sells maandazi (fried dough) and milk, was very impressed when he quickly learned to fry the maandazi. It was nice because men in the village don't cook if they are married, so to see the mzungu frying maandazi was quite a wake-up call. I explained how men in Canada and the US often will cook, clean and even do laundry for themselves, even when they're married! They thought that was hilarious. We have a long way to go.

It was also really nice to have a friend helping out on the farm. I have only a half or a third of an acre, but it's taking me quite a while to get the whole thing prepped and planted. I have about 1/3 of it done so far, but will get back to work when I return next Saturday. It is nice because people come by and ask me why I'm farming the way I do. This year the rains are incredibly heavy, and many many people have lost their bean crops and have had parts of their fields washed away. I've had a number of people say that if they'd known the rains would be so strong, they would have done their farms like me (that is with contour ridging and ditches). I am currently on a campaign to get everyone to dig ditches, which I think is the most important thing I could possibly get them to change at this point.




Me in my contoured and ditched garden.






We spent Christmas with about 25 other wazungu at my friend's village in Njombe. It was a lot of fun, and if the idea of a fat man who lives in the North Pole and spies on you all year to judge your behavior and then comes around to put presents or coal in your socks isn't weird enough, we decided to have a Christmas pinata. We hung it out on a tree and a bunch of villagers gathered around and watched us beat the thing. Some even joined in. It was a blast. We also had a deep-fried turkey.

I hope everyone had as lovely and interesting holidays as we did here!