A field trip to Food Water Shelter

A group of thirteen St. Judes volunteers and visitors got ourselves together to visit the site of Food Water Shelter, a NGO based in Australia. What an amazing group of dedicated folks and what an amazing vision they are bringing to life! Five young women, all volunteering in East Africa (two, in fact, from St. Jude) had a dream. Check out the website for pictures and details and the facts, but let me tell you here about how inspiring my afternoon was on their site.

http://www.foodwatershelter.org.au/

The volunteers live in a compound a ten minute walk (through fields and groves, past homes) from the site of the village they are building for eight or nine "mamas" - single mothers. These women will live in their own apartments with their children, and take in orphans, growing their families. And they will farm the land, growing their own food, cooking it in a communal kitchen. The entire project is environmentally sensitive, and again I urge you to check out the website. Here are a few examples:

The livestock waste runs down into a tank, and the gas it produces flows down into the kitchen where it is used to cook the food. They anticipate that they will not need to buy supplemental cooking fuels. The remaining waste will be used to fertilize the fields, helping grow the crops.

Chicken power! The kitchen floor is made of slats so that the crumbs fall to the ground, where the chickens peck away. The raised crop plots are a standard size so the chicken tractor will fit on top. A chicken tractor? A wire mesh cage. Put the cage on the plot, put the chickens under it, and let them peck aways at the leftovers from the harvest. As they claw and scrabble away, they turn over the soil! (That reminds me a bit of a story, "Working the Field" in George Shannon's book "Stories to Solve."

An aquifer is being made using recycled truck tires. They are stacked in a pit, and the pit will be covered over with a playground! The water that runs off the roofs during rains will be stored in tanks that are partially buried under the buildings. Rainwater in excess of what the tanks can hold will be funneled to the tire pit. In order to pump the water out of this aquifer, the merry-go-round that the children play on will provide the power to pump up the water. Can you picture it? Most of the water will flow down, and a “fruit forest,” an orchard, is being planted that will be watered this way. But when necessary, the children will go out to play to get the pump working to pull up water.

While we were there, a blustery storm blew up and the clouds swirled around Mt. Meru. While we didn't get any rain, when the clouds blew on, the peak was streaked with snow. By the time we had returned to St. Judes, the snow had mostly melted.

In the short time that I have been here, I have met people who have such energy and such vision. It is certainly inspiring.