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 hand where it is available. The number of farms without water source is significant and the people of this area are in trouble. The World Food Program has begun distributing some food.
We met two farmers at their farms, Boaz and Miriah. They are very fortunate to have a water source near their farms that has allowed them to manually dig irrigation. They both told us that the quality of the machine we have installed in our rice processing factory has increased both the quality and quantity of their rice production.
It is not rice harvesting season right now, so the factory we built for processing is not currently working. However, there is not much hope of great profit in this upcoming season when planting will begin in June to August, unless there is some rain. Traditionally, May is the dry season, though.
It is always wonderful to learn about cultural differences and ways of thinking through language. You can really understand a lot about a people through their way of speaking. In addition to talking about buying irrigation kits during our general meeting with the cooperative board and its members, we also spoke about seed money for farmers to take out loans to buy seeds and other needs. Here is Western Uganda, the term “mother of the money” is used to mean principle in the local language. I am not sure why, but that just made me really happy.
Much was learned today by all involved at the meeting, including me.
