Kilimanjaro, TZ – Father maintaining garden and helping spread water access – 22 Oct 2014

The AFS family has been very busy working on their garden and helping their community. The father of the family is a Certified Mine Blaster with some vocational school training in engineering. He recently came back to his home village of Mkyashi because he wanted to improve his family home and raise his kids in the village with the rest of their family.

One of the biggest problems he identified in the village was lack of water access. This was crippling many people’s ability to improve their lives. He put his training and experience to work and designed a rudimentary gravity-powered system to deliver water to standpipes at six neighboring homes. The six families pooled money together and the father of the AFS family built the system. Since building the system, three of the six families have started FAITH organic vegetable gardens.

The father of the AFS family – third from left – reviewing design drawings at the first committee meeting for the village water project.

The father is now helping with the construction of a similar, but larger, system to deliver water to more families in Mkyashi.

Water is a key garden input. Good water access has enable the AFS family to have great success since starting their garden with Rollins College volunteers in June, 2014. They eat approximately 7,000 TZS (US $4.38) of vegetables per week and sell 3,500 TZS (US $2.19) per week. They use the income to buy household staple items. The family says they have even more vegetables to sell, but they cannot always find a good market to sell the vegetables.

The AFS family garden.

The family’s most important goal is for all of their children to receive a higher level of education than their parents. They believe this is important each generation so that quality of life is constantly improving for the family. They are also interested in continuing to learn gardening best practices. They are considering expanding their garden so they can sell more vegetables if a larger market becomes available.