Weekend before last, Ronald and Betty spent the day at the farm supervising and helping with the fence project. At some point in the late morning, they had a sudden realization of what we forgot in the planning and budgeting… a LATRINE!!!!
Now, as many times as we went over everything, and as careful as we were in thinking of all the small details, somehow this never occurred to us. Honestly, after I got over laughing hysterically, I went back over all our Signal chats, meeting notes, and emails. Nope, not once did either of us ever think about, well, the very basics.
(If I could do emojis on here, there would be literally thousands of laughing ones here!)
Whew, anyway…
Thankfully, you all have been so generous so quickly that we had money in the savings account that we didn’t need right now. So, as you can see from the photo above, we contracted to get a pit latrine made. (And y’all, there is a guy way way down in that hole digging by hand… no thank you!)
We’ve adjusted our goal on DonorSee to reflect this additional expense (and yes, we’ve double checked to make sure we didn’t leave anything else big out, let me tell you!). We are now 63% funded and have a goal of $25,900. It’s only been a month, and we are WAY further along than we expected. All thanks to YOU!
The land is cleared, and we have a lot more cassava than we thought. We’ll be planting beans very soon, thanks to our volunteer farmer Moses, and maybe a few other things to get us started. (We’re thinking tomatoes and eggplant – Moses is checking out the soil conditions for us now.) The bananas are planted, there is matoke growing, and we’ve got papaya and a big mango tree. We couldn’t be more excited and thankful. (And we’re including those latrine builders in things to be thankful for, let me tell you!)
We so appreciate all your encouragement and excitement.
Blessings!
Jennings
PS If you want to help us out with the latrine and the rest of the farm, just click the button!
