A mix of feelings here today. While we have been looking forward to some rains,it rained cats and dogs today and we were cut out of our gardens.It was not possible to have the children work in the rains on anything until late in the afternoon when we completed the clearing of the gardens.Is this what happens to the farmers at times and you wonder whether it is something you would like to see happening all the time or not. We are now hatching out a way to collect the water run off into a ditch but we need the extra manpower to do it which is a bit of a problem since the project has no funding at all.So we kept in the classrooms to brainstorm on our agri-music,dance and drama productions which we hope you will be able to watch through this space.
Our appreciation goes to the teachers within the agriculture department at Gayaza High School for the commitment shown in providing the technical support on this project.We are also getting good support from the teachers within the project community school who oversee the general management of the children and make sure that we get the meals on time.We thank Dr.Robinah Sonko from Makerere University,faculty of Agriculture who is a parent in our school but has offered to provide free consultancy services on this project. Schools can find a lot of technical support from their parents if well engaged and we are testimony to this.Dr. Sonko has also sourced for us Dr.Okiror John James from her institution who has a PHD in school gardens and he will be speaking to us on Day 4. We want to hear from him what his vision is for schools so that we can bench mark some critical suggestions for the future of our work.
We recognise the other support received from three parents who have provided food stuffs-Beans,Rice and Sugar which are making our meals superb. We took our harvested 420kg of maize for milling and received a miserable 150kg of flour due to the poor storage facilities we had. Reasonable amount of food for the 2 months in the project and learning lessons for us to improve on storage.However we got about 270kg of feeds for the teachers’ piggery project-wonderful too.
Programme for Day 4:
9:00 a.m- Visit to Gayaza High School student gardens with Dr.Okiror
10:00a.m- Visit to the Community education garden-to give Dr.Okiror a background
– The children continue with planting of the direct seeds and preparing the nursery beds
11:00a.m-12 noon- Presentation from Dr.Okiror about ” WHY SCHOOL GARDENS“
2:00p.m-4:00p.m- Agri-Music,dance and drama( brainstorming on ideas).