Kikondo, UG – Wamukisa Team Completes Organic Garden Training – 27 Feb 2015

Wamukisa team with Better Lives staff.

Better Lives’ newest partner organization is based in the village of Kikondo, Uganda. Kikondo is about 20 miles from both Entebbe and Kampala. The organization is called “Wamukisa Support Organization”. In Luganda, the local language, wamukisa means “lucky ones” or “blessed ones.” The word also implies that the lucky person has a responsibility to take advantage of their luck and support others.

Michael, Rose, and Emmanuel are the three Wamukisa team members. For the past few years they have taken part in other small community programs and now they are excited for the opportunity to expand their activities in Kikondo to include a Food Always In The Home (FAITH) Organic Vegetable Gardening program.

In January the team took an 18 hour bus ride from Kampala, Uganda to Moshi, Tanzania to take part in a Better Lives’ garden program training. They qualified for the training by completing an online training with Better Lives and then building their own compost piles. After their long ride the team had a short rest and woke up “fresh and reloaded,” one of Michael’s favorite expressions.

Wamukisa is the first team to experience Better Lives’ new organic gardening training curriculum. The training used a “Plan, Do, Check” hands-on teaching methodology. The team would listen to a brief lecture by Better Lives staff, followed by group discussion. Then they would go into the field and implement the lessons they had just learned. For example, after learning about the importance of raised garden beds the team build a garden with raised beds.

Wamukisan team with the family garden they built.

Michael, Rose, and Emmanuel proved to be an eager and capable trio of students. They displayed careful attention to detail and even agreed to model compost-making best practices for a Better Lives training video. Their training covered all of the skills needed to stage, build, and maintain an organic vegetable garden.

They left the training full of enthusiasm to continue building their own garden program back home. Since returning they have maintained a compost production schedule, started marketing their program to the community, collected family applications, and begun designing a water distribution system that will enable families in the community to support their on organic vegetable gardens.

The teams next steps are to continue designing a water distribution system and to build an example garden for the community to learn from.