Today was Day 1 of visiting our Honey Farmers Cooperative. Northern Uganda is HOT, but incredibly beautiful. The villages where our farmers live are so peaceful and picturesque, although they were once the sites of horrific violence with the Lord’s Resistance Army and then deserted, left to become forest again. In the past several years …

Our first project in Rwanda was in Bugasera District in 2008 and we have been working there ever since. Being there always feels like home. We have two projects Bugasera that we visited today. Mayange Community Development Organization (MCDO) is set up like our other Village Savings and Loans groups, except there are a few …

What an incredible day! Today we drove two hours from Kigali to a new program that is part of the Mother/Child Development Project. It is a Revolving Fund (Microloans) group of 128 women deep in the mountains of Rwanda about 25 miles from one of the borders with Uganda. The project is only two months …

The Mother/Child Development Project is in the city of Kigali, which makes it very different from our rural projects. It has many different programs within it. There is the Daycare program, which serves the pre-school age children and babies of women who take part in the training programs. A mother knows that her children are …

It was my first time visiting our Maize Farmers Cooperative and what a great day it was! We began the day by taking the wrong road, causing us to be two hours late, but that definitely did not prove to be the trend of the day. Because this cooperative has not done the most stellar …

There is great potential with our Coffee Farmer Cooperative-Kanungu. This is only the end of the first year and we like to move in phases to insure that the foundation is solid before taking a big step like building a processing factory. There are already 350 members of this cooperative, with the potential to add …

The farmers in our Rice Farmers Cooperative –Kihihi are suffering from a serious drought. Driving through the countryside, there are dying and dead crops as far as the eye can see, in some places. We visited two farms today, one without a water source for irrigation and one with. The water is manually diverted by …

Sometimes things do not go as we planned and we have to find ways to solve issues and save our project. It would be dishonest to pretend that things never go wrong. At no fault of their own, our Coffee Cooperative #1 has twice suffered setbacks that caused us to regroup, re-plan and recover the …

Twenty-eight miles on a seriously challenging dirt road, one mile walking on a gorgeous path in the forest alongside a river and one mile hiking straight up the face of a mountain that would be a black diamond trail were it a ski run (the last hundred feet a picturesque green hill), and we arrived …

As always, we begin this trip by hitting the road running. I have described the drive before from Kigali in Rwanda to Kabale in Western Uganda and into the mountains of Batwa country, but it is so visually spectacular that it deserves to be said again. The scenery is staggeringly beautiful. We passed by many …