Good results from our farm training and village water projects

This pepper is called pepe. A hot pepper that's extremely popular here. Many of the farmers in our farm training project are raising it as one of their crops. It has good resale.  The farmers either sell it themselves at local markets or bag it in larger quantities and sell it to wholesalers. 

Currently we're in the dry season and it's harder to grow so prices are higher. One of our project's training topics was field location selection and watering techniques. When done properly you can raise a good crop in the dry season.

Farmers usually struggle to afford seeds for future crops. Our training class taught them how to efficiently produce their own seeds.

The effective farming techniques the participants learned  has allowed them not only to produce productive farms but as a byproduct they are able to hire a lot of the local villagers. Here are the villagers weeding. Villagers make about $3 a day and have their lunch meal provided.

 Few of the fields we visited were convenient to get to. Here is one of the better bridges that we crossed over.

We asked the farmers what they have done differently using the knowledge they obtained in our workshops. Some of the responses were better field location, knowing when and how much fertilizer to apply, knowing how to spot disease and how to treat it, knowing how much and when to water and knowing how to produce seeds for the coming year. Every farmer was able to list at least two items that they had done differently this year that produced superior crop yields.

One family got such a good yield this year that not only were they able meet their family living expenses but they were also able to purchase the materials to construct a house.  

Overall this was a very successful and encouraging project. There was 168 farmers in the project and all have reported good yields this year. It is encouraging to see people working. In cities and towns there's a lot of people just hanging around. These successful farms get everybody working and employ a lot of people.

This is one of our first projects that we inherited from our predecessors. It is a water system in a small village made up of reclaimed river bottom land. Towards the end of the project the village had great difficulty coming up with a small amount of money they needed to complete the project. Not only that, the village would need to collect fees from the water users in order to sustain the project. We thought for sure the project would fail because of the lack of village participation.

To our pleasant surprise we returned to the project and found an efficiently operating village water system. Villagers pay a small fee to have their water buckets filled up. The fee is then used to pay the water company for the bulk water as well as to make maintenance and improvements on the system. To our surprise it is working.

This was a challenging project because the land is very soft and it continually has to be replaced when it runs back into the river during the rainy season. The water tanks and the water piping had to be built for an environment that always is shifting.  So far so good. All of the water containers in the picture are waiting to be filled. They charge about 10 cents a container for filling.

We're currently towards the end of the dry season and for some reason there's lots of fires along the sides of the road. We haven't figured out if they are deliberately set for vegetation management or if they're all by accident. Luckily things are green enough that they never seem to spread too far. The air quality has been pretty lousy. I swept our balcony yesterday and swept up quite a bit of soot.  

We are still healthy and feeling good. This is a picture while we were on our farm tour. We are in a dried riverbed.