Farm

How a Farm Will Let Us Lean Into the Wind

Every week day, Mama Santa makes lunch for about 75 teens and adults, with another dozen or so children. The lunch above was on the day we went to the market for fresh groceries, so we go the added treat of eggplant, carrots, and avocado. Most days, we just had beans (made with a little onion and tomato) and posho or rice.

Posho is the least expensive carbohydrate available in Uganda — it’s finely ground maize mixed with water and cooked firm, or else mixed with water or milk and a little sugar for a porridge. On its own, it doesn’t taste like much, but it’s filling and good with beans. However, eating nothing but this day in and day out is not a recipe for optimal health!

For an increasing number of our day students, this is the only meal they get each day. There is no food at home.

Even before the daily price increases of the last 6 weeks, we had decided that we needed a self-sufficient solution for the growing food issues. We’ve spent a few months researching and pricing everything from laying hens to concrete posts to acreage, and will be launching our new farm project on DonorSee on Monday.

This is our biggest project to date, and our second “large” project on DonorSee. We have our computer lab thanks to our first, and we are even more excited about the farm.

Not only will we be able to provide vegetables and fruits, protein from eggs and moringa, and grind maize on site, we will be able to take any girls interested in learning about farming and agriculture out to work the land. While many of our teens’ families came from rural villages, our girls haven’t learned the skills that their parents and grandparents knew — and they are excited to learn!

Monday, you’ll get an email with the project link. For now, you can click the button below to get a preview of our project video. We need the project to be 10% funded from our own donors before DonorSee releases it to the wider platform, so we’d love for you to spend some time over the weekend watching the video, looking at our social media, and committing to a donation for Monday. Any amount will help us, and 100% goes to the project!

Farm Project Video Here!

Webele nyo!

Jennings

PS We were a Great Nonprofits Top Rated Nonprofit for 2021, which brought in a good number of donations through their site. We have til October 31st to get 10 new 4 or 5 star reviews to continue our status for 2022. We’d love for you to pop over there and leave us a review – it doesn’t take long! Click the button!

Yes, I’ll leave a 5* review!

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There’s a Growing Food Crisis In Uganda

Just like everywhere these days, food prices have gone crazy in Uganda. While somewhat lucky in that it only gets 60% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine (vs 100% for many African countries), it also usually gets a lot of the remaining supply from India, which has cut off wheat exports due to their own problems.

Additionally, fuel has doubled in the last several months, so that per gallon it’s now over $7.30. (They sell by the liter and it’s always more than here in the States, but this is brutal!) Obviously this effects the price of everything!

Finally, seasonality + fuel prices + supply chain problems have created a huge food crisis in the country, and particularly among the poorest — which is who we work with.

Our own food budget at the compound has doubled since January — and we’re even buying less food! Some things are completely off the menu, like chapati, and serving sizes have been reduced a bit to try to stretch the budget.

After a lot of talk, we have decided to create a large project on DonorSee to purchase 2-3 acres of land to start a small farm. Not only will this give us a sustainable source of food, it will also allow any girls who want to learn to grow food the chance to get new skills. (There’s not a lot of farming in a slum of 30,000 people!)

The project will launch next week! We’re still finalizing some prices, since everything seems to go up every day, and working on a video to show just what this project can achieve. We hope you’ll check it out once we launch, and help us continue our goals of sustainability and teaching lifetime skills to our teen moms.

Webele nyo!

Jennings

PS To donate to the farm project, click the button!

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