Creative Farmers in Toroma

By Sara:

I have been meeting with farmers in a church in Toroma, pastored by one of our friends, Moses.   When we meet together, we do a Bible study and then an agriculture lesson.  Recently, the group got really excited about making plans and about testing the germination rate of seeds.  So they divided themselves into small groups and each group made a plan to test some of their seeds.  They scheduled a time for me to come back and hear their reports.

Well, it turned out that not only did they test germination rates, but they went a step further and planted a bunch of vegetable gardens (they said "when the seeds germinated, we thought we might as well plant them").  Here is one Moses and his family put together at his house:

Another group built a raised vegetable garden because they live in a village center and wanted to protect their vegetables from the chickens, goats, and sheep who wander around.

Two of the groups came from a farther away village and so they just transported some of their container vegetable gardens to the church on their bicycles:

I definitely take no credit for these vegetable gardens since the farmers came up with the ideas all on their own.  But it is very cool to see their excitement over what they accomplished and having fresh vegetables to eat at home during the dry season.

One group was really an over-achiever and came with a list of all the activities they had done together since the last time we met.  I was even more pleased to see the Bible passages they had been studying as a group each time they got together.