Monday 24 February 2020

Down on the Farm

I’ve done a lot of different jobs since I left school. That makes me very fortunate really. I’m part of a generation that was lucky enough to enjoy good fortune in the job market for a very long time. It’s not exactly a ‘cool’ generation to belong to these days. We ‘boomers’ have to put our hands up to some of the world’s current problems I guess. It’s a sobering thought to dwell on – fixing the planet is likely to be a lot harder than breaking it was. So ……I’m doing my bit by developing our Agribusiness projects. Specifically aquaponics, rearing fish fingerlings, organic crop production and cricket farming. To that end I’ve had a good day down on the farm today.

Actually, it’s also very sobering thinking about the prospects for the agriculture industry in Africa right now. Everybody will be familiar with the idea of drought related famine in a number of African countries. Climate change is affecting us all and farmers all over the world are wondering just how they will cope with farming in the future, as climate change makes previously taken for granted assumptions about seasons and planting very uncertain. We’ve certainly noticed the change here in Kosele since we first started out in 2002. Back then growing seasons were much more predictable. Harvests were better and farming was more productive.

Climate change, huge as it is, is not what boggles my mind the most. For the pioneering farmer the future has enormous potential in Africa because of predicted population growth. The population of Africa is going to double between now and the middle of the century. That’s in thirty years’ time. It is an unimaginable situation. An exciting and at the same time horrifying prospect. It creates an enormous market but also carries the seeds of potential conflict over scarce resources. With my ‘glass half full’ head on I’m believing for the best.

In that spirit I’m planning to continue planning and scheming with our great farm team to increase fingerling numbers and maximise our crop production. We were in rescue mode in the fingerling hatchery this morning, doing a quick water change in one of our two thousand litre tanks which had become a bit deoxygenated. The five hundred fingerlings that we rescued are our first real ‘harvest’ and the guys did a good job of making sure they will survive for long enough to get them to market.

I never imagined that I’d become a farmer but I’m increasingly led to the conclusion that farming will become more important than any other sector here in Africa. It’s very hard to persuade young people that there is any kind of future in agriculture. They have understandable ambitions for safe office jobs with good prospects and see working on the farm as the worst kind of torture. We’re learning as we go along with all of our ventures. It’s very much a ‘two steps forward, one back’ kind of experience, but I couldn’t ask for a better team to work with. I really hope that our progress as a fledgling Agribusiness will encourage at least a few of our young people to reconsider life on the farm.

Saturday 8 February 2020

Do You Love Your Wife?

We had our first men’s group meeting since I’ve been back in Kosele today. I think that men’s meetings are an integral part of church life and have a strong commitment to them. It’s great sharing life with the men in our church. Unsurprisingly the same issues come up for us men wherever we are meeting.

Today we were looking at a scripture that is well know to many people – including non-Christians and people of other faiths. It’s a scripture that I like a lot because it is very short and easy to remember. In the Book of Mark chapter 12 vs 29-30 Jesus is dealing with the tricky question of what the most important commandment is. He tells the assembled crowd “The most important one is this ……. Love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second most important commandment is this: ‘Love your neighbour as you love yourself.’” This idea is the basis of the Golden Rule which enjoys massive popular support all over the world. Whether you have a faith or not it is very hard to disagree with what Jesus is saying here.

The two questions I wanted the guys to think about today were:

Do you love God? 
and 
How do you know?

To make it easier to answer the question our starter for 10 was the question “Do you love your wife?” (Most of us are married so it wasn’t a hard or unfair question.) Everybody who had a wife, obviously, said “Yes.” The “how do you know?” question was a bit trickier. One of the guys came up with an absolutely fantastic answer. He said:

“Your neighbours will say ‘I can see you love your wife.’” Simple. But incredibly powerful.

The same answer is true for the question about loving God. “Your neighbours will say ‘I can see that you love God.’”

In just the same way that marriage has its ups and downs so does our relationship with God. In the end though we live our lives out in a public arena. We can put on a front in our marriage and in church but people aren’t fooled and neither is God.

I hope my neighbours would say “I can see that you love your wife and love God” more days than not.

Wednesday 5 February 2020

Early in the morning

Every weekday morning I try to be at the gate to our compound at about 6:45 a.m. to greet students coming to school. When we’re back in the UK any time around 6 a.m. feels like an alien time zone, especially in the late autumn and winter months. Out here in Kenya it’s hard to have a lie in. Early morning is a great time as the birds start to get the day going, the sun starts beaming and the piki-piki motor bike taxis roar up and down our road.

To be honest I only really catch the stragglers from the High School as they come through the gates. Most of the students are in their classrooms ready to go by about 6:35. I’m usually joined by the ‘teacher on duty’ for the fifteen minutes before the bell rings for the first lesson of the day. We check on ties and tidiness and at five to seven, start chivvying the late arrivals in. I know the same scene plays itself out in schools at the beginning and end of the school day all over the world. It’s a bit of a ritual, but like most rituals it is reassuringly familiar and settling. 6:55 is the significant boundary time for late arrivals. At 6:55 I step out of the compound to the side of the road, looking for green shirted students in the distance who now know they will have to run the last couple of hundred yards if they’re going to get to their lessons on time. It’s generally the same students. It becomes a bit of a game.

Every morning I’m amazed how courteous, smart and ‘serious’ our students are. In the UK I used to dread the prospect of a uniform crackdown in school, as it would inevitably lead to a week or so of generally tedious confrontations with students who frequently didn’t really want to be in school in the first place and who couldn’t care less about the uniform regulations that we imposed on them. I remember feeling the same when I was a teenager. After the crackdown we’d return to the normal rules of engagement, having achieved nothing. It would be untrue to say that we don’t have any challenges with our students. We do. But they tend to be a result of their taking their education very seriously rather than the generational conflict that plays itself out in so many classrooms in more ‘developed’ countries.

Standing, first thing in the morning, by the side of our now tarmacked road, reminds me how fortunate I am to be out here, doing what I’m doing. It’s easy for me to be at work on time – I just have to get up and walk out of my front door. It sometimes seems a bit of a cliché to talk about the effort that young people have to make to get to school in Africa. It doesn’t make it any less true or impressive. It’s not just the distance that some of our students walk either – it’s the walk in the dark that they have to make when they’re aiming to be in by 6:30 and the mud they have to walk through when it’s hammered it down with rain for most of the night. I don’t know how they manage it. As a teenager I would have considered starting school at 7:00 a.m. a kind of child abuse. Our students don’t finish early either. The ‘candidate’ class (who will be sitting their secondary school leaving exam in November) don’t go home until 6:00 p.m. and the other three forms leave at five! They don’t complain – they would all feel cheated if they had their school day reduced.

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is a challenging thing to do. Every morning our students amaze me with their steadfast determination to make it to school and their belief that school still counts for something. When some minor inconvenience upsets my applecart I’m thankful that I’m living and working in a place where there are so many people who remind me how thankful I should be for each day. It doesn’t make me a perfect person, but it does keep me focused and determined to make their morning journey worthwhile. School should still count for something.

Saturday 1 February 2020

Reboot -February 1st 2020

It’s been a while (6 years!) since I posted anything on my blog. It seems a bit odd deciding to take it up again now, but it does feel right. Blogging gets me into the discipline of reflecting on my day, my activities and probably most importantly, the state of my heart. If my blogging helps, inspires or motivates any body else it will be a bonus.

A few years ago I half-heartedly started reading a book called “People in Rural Development” by Peter Batchelor. I say half-heartedly not as a criticism of the book or the author but because my initial reading came at the end of a long period of immersion in similar texts. I think a bit of development literature fatigue had set in by then.

As it turns out rediscovering the book today has proved to be a great blessing (……. cue for a discussion on God’s perfect timing which I’m sure those of you who have experienced it will recognise.) The 2nd revised edition that I am reading was published in 1993. Checking on the details on Amazon I came across the following review - “Don't be put off by the age of this book, it raises some good questions that people considering working in rural development would be wise to consider.” Very much my experience.

I work in Kosele, a rural community in the west of Kenya, not far from Lake Victoria. My wife and I started a project in Kosele in 2002, consisting of a very small children’s home and a fledgling nursery school. Now we have grown into an Early Years class, Primary School and High School. The small Sunday School that we started in 2002 is now a church with a Kenyan pastor and a Youth Ministry. We are working hard developing sustainable agribusinesses in fish and fingerling farming using an aquaponics system and in rearing crickets for food security. It’s been an amazing journey for nearly 18 years now. Our website (www.hopeandkindness.org) tells a bit more of our story (though it is need of a bit of an update!). Our most up to date news tends to be posted on Facebook these days at https://web.facebook.com/HopeandKindnessKosele/ Enough of the gratuitous self-publicity!

In the foreward to the book, Barnaba Dusu writes “In order to make an impact on the majority of people in the developing countries one must remember that they live in rural areas whereas modern development seems to be geared towards cities. This has unfortunate results: people are attracted to such centres only to find that the facilities and the ways of life are different from those they have left behind in the villages. The result is that most of them “drown” in these towns, becoming useful neither to themselves nor to their communities.

Reflecting on our work in Kosele so much that was written in 1993 seems just as true (if not even more so) in 2020. Peter Batchelor dedicated himself to the development of poor communities in rural Africa and shows a deep understanding of the possibilities as well as the barriers to achieving success in this essential work. One sentence at the beginning of Chapter one (appropriately titled “People First”) really inspired and challenged me. It said:

“We do need .. to bring people back to the point of wanting to make the sacrifice that most change calls for.”

It rocked me because it made me face up to the fact that it refers to me just as much as it does to the people in the community that my wife Judi and I are working with to try and bring about change and improvement. Two scriptures sprang to mind.

Matthew 16:24 “Then Jesus said to His disciples “If anyone wishes to follow me [as my disciple], he must deny himself [set aside selfish interests] and take up his cross [expressing a willingness to endure whatever may come] and follow me.” (Amplified Bible) …….. This prompted the question is it possible to follow Jesus as anything other than a disciple?

Luke 14:28 “But don’t begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of a building without calculating the cost to see if there is enough money to finish it? Otherwise you might complete only the foundation before running out of money and then everyone would laugh at you. They would say, ‘There’s the person who started that building and couldn’t afford to finish it.” (New Living Translation)

I’m sure that losing stamina and failing to work truly sacrificially are two reasons why it is so hard to make a real, lasting impact in the kind of work that we do. Peter Batchelor’s book is written as a life saver for those rural migrants who end up “drowning” in the city and as an inspiration to those with a heart for rural development.

In the foreward it says “Life in the rural areas should be made attractive and profitable with a view to keeping these people in their homes and in their surroundings. In these pages we find some of the ways of achieving this. The lessons are taught with a Christian bias in order to care not only for a person’s body but for his soul.”

Amen to that!