Our Goals for 2009

From Baba Mzungu

As regular readers of this blog already know, we have several projects just waiting to be started up, but with the food crisis gathering pace in Kenya, I have had to juggle the priorities about a bit.

We have our plot just outside Kisii, a particularly fertile corner of Kenya, which is doing nothing worthwhile at the moment. We are going to start our River Cottage project here.

Our priority at the moment must be to produce food. With luck, we will be able to produce a surplus which can be sold.

We have a band of kids who are more than willing to work, but as most are 9 to 12 years old, and the soil is never really dry as it rains all year round in Kisii, I can just imagine the state they will be in after a short while, digging and preparing the soil for planting - filthy!

So, we need a means of letting them clean off afterwards. Needless to say, there is no tap water at the plot and the river at the edge of the plot is down a 1:5 path, so carrying up enough water to wash of half a dozen muddy kids would be a big effort.

So, we need water collection off the roof of the existing hut and anywhere else we can find. Then, behind the hut we can build a simple shower with bamboo screens.

All this can be done at a minimal cost, and falls in quite nicely with another project title, Scrapheap Challenge.

There is a UK charity in Kisii who gives out gardening tools to "worthy causes". I just hope that an orphanage trying to grow its own food will be considered a worthy cause!