Harvesting and World Food Day

Rocky and Tony visited Ngeya Primary school and harvested Cabbages after a successful project supported by Mama Hope. Malaika kids have enjoyed sharing the harvest while Ngeya Primary school kids Continues to enjoy the cabbages and the sukuma wiki (kale) that have been doing great considering the harsh climate that we have in Maai Mahiu. The harvest is sweet but the garden is too small for the two thousand kids going to Ngeya primary school. Hopefully we could get more support and enlarge the garden which has been so helpful to these needy kids. The community has been watching the progress and are so much interested in learning how they could adapt the new technology and conserve agriculture.
Most of the people in the community are interested in the new farming method that CTC has introduced to the community of Maai-Mahiu and we hope to start a pilot program. We also have assessed five homesteads that are ready to start the new farming method. Maai- Mahiu is one of the semi arid areas where we hardly receive enough amount of rainfall and like this year there has been drought in many parts of the country and many of the people go without food for some days. We are trying as much as we can to utilise the little amount of water that we get by using drip irrigation system. I was able to visit one of our partners in Naivasha who donated drip pipe that we will use to install drip irrigation gardens in Maai Mahiu. We are alsolooking on how we could introduce green houses if we get materials that need to be recycled from the flower farms.
As we talk to the community that is so interested in trying the drip irrigation, many are pushed away by the initial cost of installing the drip kit. Although it costs about ten thousand shillings ($150) the needy in the community can never come up with such an amount of money as they are now struggling to put some food in the table. It becomes hard to talk about the future while the now is so desperate.
The shosho shamba has kicked off with five very excited and enthusiastic grandmas who are ready to give this garden a new look. They have been working hard every day and learning how they will be doing it in the future. I believe that we will be planting by the end of this week. Our meeting with them was successful and very fruitful. They all welcomed the new business plan and hope to work at making it succeed.
As we talk about introducing the new way of farming in Maai Mahiu, this year’s world food day will take place on the16th October with a theme is fighting food crises in future. Maai Mahiu has been picked as the place to do an exhibition on what the community is doing to make sure people don’t do hungry.
CTC is in the forefront in preparing for this exhibition together with Red Cross, Naivasha flower farms and several others. We hope to do a small drip irrigation demo and take other products from Malaika Mums. Everyone is very excited abut the day and more than anything else about the achievements of CTC within this community. We hope to have a great day and an opportunity to train many people who will attend this event. Let us join hands and reduce the number of people that are suffering from hunger in Maai Mahiu and other parts of the world.
Rocky Muuri