All hands on deck

Our visitors from Cisco left this morning, leaving a number of sad children and staff behind. They made a really good impression while they were here and will, I am sure, have inspired a number of the children. After having had visitors for the last couple of weeks the place felt a bit quiet today. The lull will only be temporary. We still have a lot to do.

As I type the rain is pounding on our roof and I've had to turn the mp3 player up full to hear it. If this really is the start of the rainy season we will have our work cut out for the next 10 days or so to prepare the fields for planting. Duncan, our farm manager, is accompanying our visitors to Nairobi as part of his training and won't be back until Saturday. When he returns we will have to convene a major planning session for the farm. There is now a lot to co-ordinate. The goat enclosure should be ready next week and the land has mostly been cleared from last year's harvest. We should be receiving a visit from an agronomist for advice about running the greenhouse soon. We will be putting the Farming God's Way method into practise again this season so will be making marker ropes for measuring out the fields for planting. We will be running a training session on Wednesday for our Agriculture College students and two other groups from projects outside Kosele, (including a guy from Uganda). After the training it will be all hands on deck for digging, planting and mulching our fields.

(For more information on Farming God's Way go to www.farming-gods-way.org).

The next step to completing our plans for agricultural expansion is to find out how viable it would be to set up a fish pond. We have a meeting with the local fisheries officer on Monday and we are hoping that he will be able to tell us whether or not it would be possible to start a fish pond for about five hundred fish on our land. It's potentially a very exciting project. The fishermen on Lake Victoria have, for a number of reasons, been finding it difficult to net good catches of late. The price of fish has gone up and fish farming has become more popular. The fish market is very lucrative. Being able to sell into it would take us one step closer to self-sufficiency.