What I've been up to (work wise)

Sometimes I find myself talking about stuff I think many people don't know, so here's what I've been up to a bit.

Wilfrieda, Mawe Hai, and I are beginning to take agriculture to some of the programs of HEAL around Goma. Right now this is Ndosho (which is a transit house I believe and they also have programs for kids) and Grounds for Hope, and will soon be a school (Jethrope or something like that). We are bringing in soil to get things started and will teach raising vegetables and composting and things like that. We are also using rabbits to provide protein, fertilizer (manure), and a rather tasty end product. The rabbit houses is what I've been working on mainly. I have a design in my head that uses almost entirely bamboo, but I decided I wasn't going to say "this is how it should be done" because first off, that would be dumb since i have no experience in building rabbit hutches in the Congo, and second because I am very interested in what the workers are doing and trying to figure out why they are doing it.

Besides this, Wilfrieda and I are going to meet Sunday afternoon to talk about the objectives and purpose of Mawe Hai and to hopefully get some guidance for where we are going in the years to come. I'm really hoping for a great meeting where Wilfrieda will be challenged to stop following what other people tell her to do only and start having ideas of her own (that are realistic) and to start taking ownership in Mawe Hai and really being a leader for it. Now there isn't a clear leader for Mawe Hai and it lacks vision, which makes a lot of things more difficult.

We also got 6kg of moringa seeds from Bunia, Congo which is north of here. We're hoping these seeds grow a lot better than the previous ones we planted from Kigali, and we will also plant these soon to capitalize on their viability (which doesn't last that long in moringa, about a year tops).

Finally, I've been roped in to helping oversee and brainstorm some of the building projects going on at HEAL. Basically what I do is talk to Dick Anderson (who is here until March) and he runs all his ideas past me. I also keep in contact with an engineer from Canada who came with the team from Wisconsin and tell him what's going on and he gives me feed back. The biggest thing we're doing is rearranging the semi containers at the Jubilee Center that are used for storage. There are 7 of them and we are designing it so there is storage, office space, and a covered work area. Dick is heading all the logistical stuff with that, but we talk about it a lot and it's pretty fun.

One more thing is sometime soon (within a couple weeks) I'm going to go to Beni, Congo (north of here) and work with David Kasali and the Congo Initiative (www.congoinitiative.org) to help plan and throw out ideas for agriculture on their 90 acre plot of land. I'm really excited about that and am sure you'll hear more about that if I actually go (and I'm planning on it). So, all in all, I'm not very busy.