By Sara:
I am enjoying my farmer group in Magoro. It isn't a huge group of people, but the ones who attend are enthusiastic and invested in learning and growing together. I always enjoy the Bible studies we do together because they take it very seriously and make sure everyone understands the meaning of all the words in each passage. Sometimes the Ateso translation uses "old" Ateso words people don't use in common speech today, so they have to make sure they define those for everyone. They also do a great job coming up with action plans based on what they learn, to put the Bible study into practice.
We had a fun lesson together studying soil. Everyone brought a sample from their garden at home and we compared and contrasted the samples. It was interesting to see how different they could be from within a small community.
We also dug a hole together to demonstrate how you can see different layers of soil in the ground.
One of the more unusual lessons was on specific ways to take care of the types of animals people most commonly have. I taught the group how to make salt blocks for cows/goats/sheep using locally available resources. The cost of making one is about 40x cheaper than buying one from a shop. I also taught them how to trim goat/sheep feet, something not commonly done in Uganda. As a result, a lot of animals have deformed feet, like having super overgrown toenails. The group borrowed a neighbor's animals and practiced on them. They might not look happy in these pictures, but they ran away with more comfortable feet after we were done!
