Bread Baking Training

By Sara:

Lately, I had the opportunity to have a few ladies who are serious about baking come over and learn how to bake bread using the clay oven that I have at home.  I started the fire and made a little bread dough before they came so we could get started right away, but they did everything else once they arrived.  It was a very interactive learning experience!

We made pita bread, some buns (which you can see below):

 Mixed together a basic yeast dough to make loaves of bread:

And a non-yeast bread: Irish soda bread:

Everyone had a lot of fun and enjoyed tasting the things that their hands had made!

Skillet Baking

By Sara:

I recently had some women come over to learn how to bake breads on a skillet ("stove top" baking).  We made plain biscuits, scones, and sweet potato biscuits.

Like I've shared before, most people do not own an oven, so they are somewhat limited in what kinds of breads they can make.  But, they still enjoy eating bread.  So, this was an opportunity to learn how to bake some breads that people don't usually have here, using the resources that they do have.

Everyone had fun and especially enjoyed the final step of the baking process - tasting what we had made!

Conservation Agriculture in Progress

By Sara:

I was recently out visiting the places where our Ugandan partner organizations are doing their agricultural programs to see what the farmers are doing "in the field".  Here are a few pictures and stories so you can also see what is happening.

In Kaberamaido, one farmer has just planted mucuna and lablab, two green manure/cover crops (gm/ccs), with his maize.  Mucuna, especially, is a very fast-growing vine, so it cannot be planted until the maize is relatively large, otherwise it will tear down the maize plants.  But these two gm/ccs will help to improve the soil in this farmer's garden and will add nutrients back that were lost to the maize plants.

 We also visited a lady who is very proud of her giant tomato plants.

She attributes their growth to the mulch and the jackbean (shown below), another gm/cc, which she put around the tomato plants.

Then, in Amuria, farmers are planting mucuna and jackbean alone to improve their soil so that they can plant another crop there next season and get better yield due to the better quality soil.

There are also some demonstrations started where the lead farmers are comparing mulched and un-mulched maize and beans.

Some farmers are also intercropping maize and beans (specifically rice bean, in the case below) to help improve the soil and keep the soil under the maize cooler and more moist.

By far the best garden we saw, though, was in Katakwi.  Salome went home from the KIDO conservation agriculture training and immediately planted a demonstration garden at home, comparing mulched and un-mulched maize and beans.  You can see her standing in the part that was mulched in the photo below.

And then the difference between the mulched (on your left) and un-mulched (on your right) sections of the garden.

The lead farmers, like Salome, trained groups of other farmers on what they had learned about conservation agriculture.  But some of their neighbors saw what was going on and are trying it themselves, without even being taught!  In the picture below, you can see a garden where a farmer who was not in one of the participating groups is trying a comparison of mulch and no mulch in a section of garden.

Here are some of the lead farmers who are training and encouraging their groups in conservation agriculture:

Women in Office Discussion

By Sara:

Last year, Anthony started a pastors discussion group in Soroti with some of the Pentecostal church pastors.  One of the topics that they wanted to discuss was about having women as leaders and pastors in the church.  Pentecostal Assemblies of God (PAG) in Uganda has women pastors and deacons, and one woman bishop, but no women who are reverends.  So the pastors wanted to discuss the Bible passages that talk about this subject.

Anthony printed out the Christian Reformed Church's report from study committees about the different Bible passages regarding women in church leadership and the comments from both sides of the issue on those passages.  The pastor of the main church in town gave copies to different pastors and church leaders and we got together for a discussion (and by we, I mean I went too because they also had women's leaders present).

Even in three hours, we only got through the introduction of the topic and a discussion of the pertinent passages in Genesis.  So, we met again a few weeks later to continue the conversation.  We hope that, whatever their view, those who participated went away with a better understanding, biblically, as to why they hold to that view.