The Magoma Project

It was a hot and sunny day in Kijango.  After waiting for people to slowly trickle in, we started our poultry management training an hour and a half late.  Our trainer was Mr. Mfundo, the agriculture extension officer specializing in livestock management.  Nine students, four teachers, three community members, and two 2Seeds Project Coordinators sat down together in a dusty classroom to listen to Mr. Mfundo’s expert advice on chicken coop upkeep, food and water requirements, egg and chick production, and disease prevention.  Mr. Mfundo was very knowledgeable on the subject and his four hour lecture was very informative.  But it became clear early on that he wasn’t the most engaging teacher.

From our perspective, his monotone words, stationary stance, and tenacious use of the chalkboard were not conducive to us learning the material.  While the small audience we had gathered tried hard, copying down his every written word—everyone in the training was struggling to pay attention.  The rumpus of rambunctious students in neighboring classrooms, the crowing of roosters nearby, and the ringing thuds of falling twigs on the metal roof above us were all distractions that drew our attention outside.  While everyone left with their notes and certificates of participation, we’re skeptical whether anyone in that classroom truly learned the material. 

Had this training taken place within the first few months of our time here in Tanzania, we might have added this up to slight failure.  But after seven months of us working closely with the national school system, we knew better.  Because in Tanzania, formal education typically comprises rote learning and memorization.  And however frustrating that can be for us, it’s simply the reality here.  

While we succeeded in bringing accurate information about poultry management to Kijango, we have yet to succeed in getting our project partners to fully understand that information.  This will take review, practical application, and, almost certainly, trial and error.  

Unfortunately, this is often where other organizations stop.  After delivering information, formal training, and resources to rural villages, more often than not, an organization’s presence will wane.  As 2Seeds Project Coordinators, we too have delivered information, provided a formal training, and built a chicken coop, but this is only the beginning for us.  Every step we take in this project is driven by a set of core values, two which are experiential learning and second chances.  So our real work begins now.

We are now familiar with the fact that the bulk of missing information that can help villagers improve their agricultural production and household incomes isn’t easily transferred.  We’re sorry to say that most trainings are just plain boring and most of the information stays on paper.  Knowing this, the Magoma Project is attempting to provide our partners with the opportunity to take this information and learn it by practice, not rote.  

Unfortunately this means that our worst fear will probably come true—a few (or all) of our chickens will probably die.  Vaccines will be missed, bad water or food will be given, diseases will strike—anything could happen.  It could be our project partners’ fault, it could not.  But how many things have you learned on the first try?  Turning information into practical understanding comes with its own casualties and we, unlike most people in the village, can afford to let that happen.   

We’re getting anxious as we place the finishing touches on our coop, as we tack the gruesome poster of poultry diseases in the school’s office, and get ready to buy our first 20 hens.  We will stumble and we will fall, but the real test of our success is whether our partners—students, teachers, and community members—can turn their formal educations into practical skills and understanding.  

We’ve only just begun.

Our project in Kijango is moving onwards and upwards.  The chicken coop is almost finished!  It’s been a slow and tedious process, but it looks great so far!  A week or two more and it will be ready to welcome our first brood of chickens!  Check it out:

Digging the chicken coop’s foundation with our fundi (building contractor), Chinga. 

A student helps select bricks.

Cintia sits on our half-finished wall, after a long days work.

The completed one meter brick wall.

The brick wall.  The bricks and mud that holds them together are made from the regions red soil.  

Cintia and a few students breaking rocks for the corner post foundation.

Kids mixing cement.

Chinga and a bucket of cement.

Laying cement to set the corner posts.

Cintia taking a break with some of the kids.

The construction site.  The students have been working really hard to help us, by carrying buckets of water from the valley’s river about 2km away.  We couldn’t do this without them!

Kids cutting boards for the frame.

Chinga and some students wood boards for the frame.

Chinga and some students nailing up the wire.

Chinga and some students nailing up the wire.

The (unfinished) chicken coop, to date!

The month of December is the break between school years for the Tanzanian education system and is also the time when most students and their families travel to visit their families in other villages, districts, and regions of the country. It also, unfortunately, coincided with one of the most critical growing periods for our school shamba (farm). We finished transplanting our pilipili hoho (green pepper) seedlings in the last week of November and needed to follow that with some serious TLC, such as irrigation and weeding. School vacation in Magoma was a challenge for us, but we were pleasantly surprised by our success.

In an attempt to keep getting students to come to the shamba to irrigate—at 6:30am and 4pm—we developed a small reward system. Every student who came to the shamba received a ribbon bracelet and each additional time they came they would receive a piece of colorful fabric to tie onto it. If they reached seven ties they would get a new, different colored bracelet and a small zawadi (gift), which were generously donated by our Project’s donors and supporters. The first gift was a pencil and a balloon and the second a marble and a lollipop.

The students loved the bracelets, maybe even more than the zawadis and it sparked some competition among them to see who can come the most often. The bracelets also served as a visual reminder about the project to both the kids who wore them and their friends who admired them. And most importantly, our shamba was well watered over vacation and our pilipili are starting to fruit!

Happy children with their irrigation bracelets over vacation.

To celebrate our victory over vacation we wanted to reward the kids who worked the hardest.  So we tallied up our attendance records for a list of the top students.  At a school-wide celebration under the shade of some trees, the top ten students were called up to the front of the entire school body and recognized for their hard work with an additional zawadi (a pencil, bracelets, and a small jar of blowing bubbles—again generously donated by our donors).  

Cintia rewarding the top ten students at our school-wide celebration.

The top ten (minus one) showing off their zawadis.

At the end of the celebration, the top 65 students were also rewarded for their hard work by helping us add the final touches to our new mural at school!  We chose the outer wall of the school next to a heavily trafficked pathway to optimize its visibility.  After hiring a painter to plaster and white-wash the wall, we started painting our mural design.  People were so curious throughout the entire process, walking past the wall to stop and stare, asking us questions, and complimenting our drawing skills.  Those top 65 students each contributed a handprint to complete pilipili plants and were so excited to do so.

Our new mural at school!

Our project partners chose a wonderful phrase—Kwa pamoja, tunaweza (united, we are able)—which we now hear all over the village.  The globe also highlights our three nations (Tanzania, Brazil, and the U.S.A.) to show everyone where we’re from.  We think it turned out beautiful and are getting lots of compliments on it, which is a good sign!  

We hope that it continues to serve as a colorful reminder to the village about the project’s presence and be a point of pride for the students who contributed in the making.   

Part of this year’s work for us as Magoma Project Coordinators is working in a neighboring village—about 8km away—on a similar school feeding program.  Our hope is that the two villages can push each other to achieve their goals and help each other with problem solving and innovation. 

The project in Magoma was mimicked last year in Kijango, with students caring for a shamba of irrigated vegetable crops, but to no avail.  Lack of water sources near the school shamba (farm) was a huge problem.  So after conducting some research in Kijango we decided with our partners to start a poultry project instead.  The students would learn about how to raise chickens and sell eggs at market, the profits from which would go towards their school lunch program.

We’ve taken the process slowly, careful not to rush into anything without considering all aspects of the project’s life span.  But happy to say that we’re now in full swing. 

Our management system, which consists of three focus teams and chairman (the school’s headmaster), has been established and we think the leaders our project partners have selected will work well.  Within each of the three teams are three leaders: one teacher, one community member, and one student.  We hope that this will increase the involvement of key people in order for the project to operate along existing lines of communication within the community and the school.  In addition, we hope that we’ll be able to dynamically involve our main stakeholders, a population that is often overlooked in Tanzanian school systems: the students.   

This week we’ll be having our inaugural meetings, so to speak, with each group and its respective leaders, to discuss the team’s responsibilities, how they will divide those responsibilities among themselves, and how to hold themselves accountable.

Alongside these managerial activities, we’ve also started building our chicken coop!  We had hoped to finish most of the construction over the month of December, but school vacation meant that most of the students were away visiting family and weren’t able to help us.  Now that school has started up again, we’re back on track and hope to finish the coop within the next few weeks!

Stay tuned for more updates and photos!

I update this blog today with a bit of regret as I haven’t posted in quite awhile. Much has happened with the Magoma Project since the devastating flood and I hope to fill you in. Read on for a recap and rest assured that posts from now on will be coming more frequently.

The school shamba (farm) has recovered from the flood and in the process has gained some beautiful, rich, loamy soil (blessing and a curse). The water was taking too much time to leave the shamba (turned out to be three weeks), but time was running out on us. So we decided with our project partners that we would plant peppers seeds in a new nursery in a dry area near the school. The kids did a great job cultivating the nursery, building a fence to keep livestock out, and keeping that hot, sunny space irrigated every day. We were so proud.

Standard 5 students after finishing the construction of our new nursery’s fence.

We wanted to take the flood and turn it into a learning opportunity so we planned and carried out a water management training for the community.  We invited Mr. Kweka, the Irrigation Officer at the district agriculture office, to teach a collection of students, teachers, parents and local farmers about how to manage minimal and excess amounts of water on a shamba.  He did a great job making the training interactive and we ended with a practical application of material digging channels on the school shamba.  We had the students and teachers who attended the training teach more of the students at school while we finished cultivating the rest of our beds for transplanting.

Students digging a water channel at the shamba during the water management training.

The entire crew from Standards 5 and 6 after we finished cultivating 40 beds.

Transplanting has happened a couple times as the sun has made for really harsh conditions down at the shamba.  But the students helped us transplant about 80 rows of pepper seedlings.  We burned holes in some old plastic water bottles to serve as watering cans for the delicate seedlings and the students have been irrigating those seedlings exceptionally well.  Even over school’s vacation when a lot of students and their families left the village!  We rewarded students who came to irrigate with a piecemeal system of colored ribbon bracelets.  If the students came seven times they would get a zawadi (gift), like a balloon and a pencil or a lollipop and a marble.  They loved the bracelets and the zawadis and the peppers loved the irrigation.  Again, we were so proud.

Kids transplanting pilipili hoho (green pepper) seedlings at the shamba.

In Kijango, the development of our chicken livestock project is progressing.  We’ve been identifying leaders and partners and have been working mostly on building the chicken coop.  We’ve hired a contractor to help us build the coop (we’ve been doing as much work as he has!) and have involved some of the kids in the process.  We’ve finished the brick foundation and half of the one meter wall so far, but school vacation proved to be much harder in Kijango than in Magoma.  Far fewer kids were coming to school and after a few weeks they stopped coming completely.  We’ve had to put construction progress on hold, but will be picking up where we left off this week.  

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That’s the word up until today.  As school starts up again, so too will our work.  Stay tuned for more stories and progress!  And check out our latest point of publicity in Cornell’s Department of Horticulture blog!

Vuli, the short rainy season, has arrived in Magoma and last week we received five or six days of straight rain.  The rains have since ceased (for awhile), but the effects are still lingering.  

So if you haven’t already guessed, I’m afraid that we’ve got some good news and some bad news to share from the Magoma Project.  

Short and simple, the bad news is that the school shamba (farm) was flooded; the good news is that we’re resilient and already moving forward.

The day we discovered the flood was hard for both of us on so many levels.  We each had our own reaction and our own way of recovering and moving forward.  We’ve shared our stories on each of our personal blogs.  

You can find Cintia’s story here.  And Lindsay’s story here. 

Lots has been going on in Magoma these past few months.  We could tell you about it all and write a thousand words for each.  

Or, we could just show you. 

Cognizant of what having a digital camera means here (i.e. wealth), we haven’t been exactly snap-happy lately.  But we have a few great shots to share.  So let us take a scenic tour of our past two months in Magoma.  

A group of kids performing Islamic song and dance on Eid, the Muslim holiday concluding the holy month of Ramadan. 

Cintia helping cook one of many giant pots of pilau, a spiced rice dish, for Eid. 

Another group of kids performing Islamic song and dance on Eid, the Muslim holiday concluding the holy month of Ramadan. 

A view up the valley towards Magoma from our friend Mama Fatuma’s rice shamba (farm).

Lindsay helping Mama Fatuma cook ugali, a staple food made from maize flour, at her rice shamba hut.

A view of the school farm and our current crop of pilipili hoho (green bell pepper).

Mzee (elder) Mwankai planting pilipili hoho seeds in our nursery.

Cintia and three boys from standard six planting onion seeds in our nursery.

The seed planting crew after finishing the job.

The finished nursery of onion and pepper seedlings with protective shades made from sticks and grass.

A worm’s eye view of our newly sprouted onion seedlings under their shade.

A group of very girls from Kwata primary school harvesting pilipili hoho from the school shamba.

A pile of pilipili hoho ready to be quality sorted and sold.

Team Magoma and Team Kariakoo (visiting from Dar es Salaam) posing on our hike above Magoma.

An open view of the valley and Magoma.

A few hours after sunset and the breaking of Ramadan fast, we found ourselves sitting on a woven, red mat in a small cement room of mzee Malingumu’s (elder Malingumu’s) home. The night was cool and a quiet breeze carried grains of Magoma’s red soil through the air.

Sipping on coffee and nibbling on dates—a Ramadan tradition—mzee spoke to us about the culture we had just entered here in Magoma.

“When you greet a person, you must smile always,” said mzee. “And when you speak, you must show your love and happiness—coming from your heart—on your face.”

While we met on the limited peripheries of both of our shared languages (English and Swahili), we think those few words of wisdom could not have been articulated better.

We’ve taken mzee’s advice to heart, greeting everyone we see in the village with a smile.  It’s a continuous exchange of positivity, regardless the circumstances.

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In this first month we’ve spent in Magoma, we’ve been working hard to assess the current situation and, in doing so, we’ve also started to better understand our ultimate role here as 2Seeds Project Coordinators.

We’ve been trying to understand the framework of the existing project, honor its victories, and identify its struggles. We’ve been building relationships with teachers, students, parents, and community members and outlining their roles in the project. And we’ve been recognizing the questions that need to be asked and answers that need to be found.

But we won’t have all the answers to those questions and we’re not here to provide them.

We’re here because we got lucky; we’re here because we grew up with access to a world of information and the freedom to find it.

We’re here because we want to help others; we’re here because we want to share what has come from the opportunities we’ve been given.

We’re here because we can to help weave the right network of partners who can answer the questions that need to be asked; we’re here to connect the right people who can sustainably carry this project (and other 2Seeds projects) into the future. They could be in Magoma, elsewhere in Tanzania, in the U.S., Brazil, or somewhere else abroad.

Ultimately, we’re here to be a current of forward momentum, to be a continuous stream of ideas, and to be a constant source of positive energy. The frustrations will be many and we will travel to the end of our rope and back again, probably multiple times.

But we’ll be here. With smiles on our faces.

We made it!  The Lutundi, Korogwe, Kwakaliga, a third of Bombo-Majimoto (Jake), and Magoma teams—half of this year’s 2Seeds PCs—have arrived safely in Dar es Salaam!  

Sam and Ana karibuni sana-ed us to the largest city of Tanzania yesterday morning.  We spent most of the day relaxing, grappling with jetlag, and tackling some logistics (like internet!); sleep never felt so good.  The ever-charming Father Komba, Tanzanian Chairman of 2Seeds,  also visited us with a warm welcome.  A lovely dinner out at the corner BBQ topped off the evening.

We await our training in Korogwe in the week ahead.  In two weeks the other half will arrive to do the same thing.  

We’ll keep you posted!

T-18 hours till I officially depart for Dar es Salaam!  I’m flying from my home state of Washington, Cintia’s flying from Brazil, and we’ll cross paths in London.  So excited—my bags were packed on Sunday!

You’ll hear from us when we hit the ground in Tanzania!  We’ll spend the first several days in training with the other PCs from round one.  Then we’re off to beautiful Magoma!   

Also, fantastic news from the both of us!

Last minute fundraising has been successful!  Cintia’s latest update reached $7543.38!  Meanwhile, my celebratory send-off raised over $700 through a silent auction.  Local Pullman goodies and some generous family, friends, and neighbors filled the gap!  I’ve reached my $6000 goal with a little bit to spare!  

This doesn’t mean we’re stopping.  And it’s not too late to donate.  Visit www.2seeds.org/donate/ to make your generous contribution. 

Thanks to all of our supporters!  You’re all apart of Team Magoma!