Chameleons and Fish

 By Anthony:

The last 4-5 months have included a lot of fun watching and holding chameleons. Most Ugandans think chameleons are poisonous and kill them. Or they dislike them because of the funny way that they move and their ability to change color. We told friends and neighbors that we would love it if they would take the chameleons to our garden rather than killing them. People started bringing them over. One week we had someone bring us a chameleon every day. Thankfully it has stopped, because it was getting to be a bit much after 20-30 chameleons! I'm encouraged to know that they are not endangered in our area even with people killing them.

Our yard is about 1/2 acre, and we have a brick wall, so it's possible most of them are still here, but we think some of them have probably moved off, which is fine. They are really hard to find even though there are many. They blend into the garden plants and trees so well. But so far for almost every visitor we have had, we have been able to go around looking for them and find at least one chameleon for the visitor to hold. 

These two were angry at each other:

My fish pond has been a big project and has nothing at all to do with ministry here. It is just something fun I wanted to do. Since my childhood, I always wished to have a fish pond. Now, I will be able to fish for some of our suppers, and I also look forward to giving fish to a lot of friends, visitors, and neighbors. Some people rarely buy meat or fish because of the expense, so I expect it will be a great gift to people.

The last time I shared photos of the pond it was only of the beginning stages of digging. Here are photos from the digging being completed. I wanted it to be 2 meters deep, but we could not do so. It was far too rocky in the ground to go that deep. After a few inches of soil, it was all just rock, clay, and stone. It was incredibly difficult to dig. Therefore, we stopped at 1.5 meters deep. Then we heaped a hill around the sides for the last 1/2 meter. So overall it will be two meters deep, but you climb a slight rise to get to the edge of the pond.

The small stones / clay stuff is called "marram" here and it is what they use on roads. Those roads are much better than roads that are just dirt or sand. We are in the process still of giving away all of the excess that we dug out of the ground.

We added some clay to the edges to make the edges less rocky and more smooth. I tried to think of ways to not have the plastic get pierced on the edges of the rise. The company I bought the plastic from installed it. 

The installation was included with the price of the plastic lining. They had to lay down strips of the heavy plastic and use a special melting tool to merge the sheets of plastic together. It's very thick and sturdy plastic. We are in such a hot and dry area that plastic is required or the water would not stay.

After the installation I still got worried about rocks piercing the plastic, so we removed it and put cardboard boxes under it on the edges. And then put back the plastic.

We are filling it so far with just rain water. During dry seasons I may top it off with tap water. There is a tap near the pond and we have a hose. Hopefully I will never have to do that, though. Rain water is working well so far.

My guard helped to find some water plants for the pond. We have water lilies, water hyacinth, and papyrus. Somehow nature found a way, and without our intentional introduction, there are some other tiny fish (not sure what species yet), frogs, snails, and lots of insects. At one point there were many thousands of tadpoles. I had an electrician help me set up a solar panel to run a water pump I bought. We just run it at night and charge it during the day. This way water from lower down that has less oxygen is pumped out and falls back down into the pond, pushing more air back into the water again. This is really important for fish who don't do well in standing water. I'm hoping this will be enough.

The number of snails concerned me, especially since snails here can carry schistosomiasis (bilharzia), which is a nasty parasite that can come out into the water from snails, and then enter your skin, and cause you massive health problems. I did some tests that a doctor in Kampala told me to try, and it seems my snails do not carry this parasite, for which I am very thankful. And because no humans will be pooping in the water who are already infected (nor pooping in it at all!), my pond will never get infected. I may do some more tests later again just to be sure we didn't transport bad snails with the water plants.

We collect rain water from the house which the guards use. It goes from the gutters through pipes. 

The pipes may look like an eyesore right now, but we planted grape vines and other climbing flowers to go up all the poles. It will look really nice later.

We also collect rain water from our house and can get it to the pond with a hose.

Sometimes the rain in the rainy season is intense:

Some months ago, I ordered 200 Nile tilapia fingerlings. I paid with mobile money, and then a young man brought this bag on a bus from the Kampala area. He reached Soroti at like 3am because of the bus breaking down. I met him in the morning.

Some weeks later they looked like this

I feed them once a day some fish food, but they can also eat insects, microorganisms in the water, and plant particles from the water plants. It's a nice thing to do every evening when I'm home, to get outside and enjoy the fish. I read somewhere that pastors need a practical project to work on with their hands. This has become mine recently.

The tilapia are now about 4-5 inches long. Not near big enough to eat, still small, but much bigger than in the video above. Now that the tilapia are big enough not to be eaten by small catfish, I added about 30 catfish. The goal is that when the tilapia start reproducing, the catfish should keep their numbers down.

We also connected some lights to the solar panel so that insects will come at night and hopefully the fish can eat them. This is more or less what it looks like now, but we have gotten a lot of rain lately, so it's now higher than this.

Upcoming Projects which I will keep you updated on:
- Adding more plants to keep the algae in the water down
- Building a duck dock, so that the ducks can be invited to the pond. They need an easier way to get in and out so they don't get stuck.

- Making sure our drainage pipe is aligned properly, so the pond doesn't overflow.

- Fishing for my first fish when they get big enough! The first fruits might go to a pastor at church :) 

Magoro Farmer Group

 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!