I have included the minutes from a couple of meetings that Paul and myself attended while we were in Africa. They are important meetings in which goals and milestones were set with council and tribe leaders. The following initiatives were discussed in both meetings:
Objective
1) Community Dry Farming Initiative (Most Important)
To educate the importance and proper techniques of what we know as Dry Farming in the states. We will teach and more importantly show that dry farming is indeed possible for the Ethiopian people and will allow them to get one extra crop per year that they desperately need.
2) Orchard
Showing the importance and proper maintenance of tree seeding. We are including many variety of plants for R&D including apple, papaya, Paul’s Peaches :-), and others that I don’t know how they are translated in English. Trees will be watered daily during the dry season for the first year only. The following years the trees will not be manually watered and will have to rely solely on rain fall. Some will fail, but we will then know which ones survive and which ones will be suitable for use during the dry season.
3) Irrigation
It is believed that that current irrigation system providing water for a
couple hundred acres of land is only producing at less the 30% of its
actual capacity. Using some manual labor and a little know how (provided by Brent Keller) we plan to clean up the irrigation system and open it to its full potential.
4) Livestock
This initiative can only begin under the conditions that animals have
access to clean water, good forage, and are healthy. The idea is to place
8 animals, cows and calves, in a feeding lot provided with alp alpha and other healthy forage, and with clean water and measure their success against an identical “control group” being feed by current traditional methods. We hope that this will be an opening for our next initiative and it is to get the water point open for access to the people.
5) Water points
We will work on establishing a good report with county and tribal leaders in order to open up the currently secured water points (which were built by the LDS church). They are currently on lock down and require locals to purchase water instead of being able to partake of it freely. This has caused many people to return to the rivers to collect parasitic water as it can be freely taken from rivers and lakes. Unfortunately this has thrown the community back into the existing problem of dangerous diseases affecting them and their livestock.