Kilimanjaro, TZ – BMM family – 31 Jan 2013

The BMM family was highlighted at the end of 2013 for their excellent work and they continue to work hard and maintain a productive vegetable garden that is helping to improve their quality of life. At the end of 2013 they were just beginning to experience the benefits of maintaining a productive garden and now they are beginning to see what those benefits can look like when they are sustained.

Rotating legumes into garden beds helps sustain productive gardens for years because the plants put important nutrients back into the soil.

This bed provides a great example of risk minimization through intercropping. Even though the kale in this picture is dying, the onions are doing well.

It is not easy to make major life improvements with twelve kids. Food, school fees, medicine, and clothes all add up to a seemingly insurmountable catalogue of expenses for poor families. To lift such a large family out of poverty requires patience, determination, and some level of sacrifice by all family members.

Mama and Baba BMM smiling over a good harvest of zucchini and cucumbers.

The family eats most of the vegetables they grow. Somebody always wants to eat the vegetables, so any time they decide to sell or trade vegetables it is a trade-off between nutrition and another pressing need. Over the past month, the family sold 6,000 TZS ( US$3.75 ) of vegetables and bartered some vegetables for building supplies.

Fresh eggplant from the BMM family garden.

The family sold vegetables to buy soap and cooking oil. They are hoping the soap will help the young children fight off the jiggers that are so prevalent around their home. Jiggers are a serious problem for poor families across east Africa. They lie in the mud and burrow into bare skin. While jiggers most commonly affect people’s hands and feet, the youngest BMM children have been afflicted by jiggers all the way up their legs because they don’t have pants to protect them when they’re sitting on the ground or soap to clean their legs afterwards. The family is grateful to be able to provide their young children with better hygiene.

From the time they started harvesting vegetables the family has slowly been trading for building supplies to improve their home. So far they have collected bricks they will eventually use to build a brick house instead of the stick and board house they currently live in. It may take them a while to save enough bricks with so many other expenses, but the family is happy to be slowly moving towards a better life.

Blocks to be used in future home improvement projects.

The greatest challenge the BMM family is facing in maintaining their garden is dealing with the wind. Their garden is on a hillside and the wind blows the netting of their fence off from the fence posts. Once the netting has been blown off the vegetables are directly hit with the wind and this has had a negative impact on the growth of some plants. To solve this problem, the family is working to strengthen the netting by putting up more fence post and placing crossbeams between fence posts.

It is inspiring to watch the BMM family making steady improvements to their garden and their life.