SUCCESS!!

Monday 28 July the Uukumwe Committee celebrated their first garden
harvest! We have been meeting every Monday since January of this year
and finally our efforts through collaboration and perseverance have
paid off with some tangible results! This group has two principal
projects, the community garden to help assist those who are living
positively with HIV/AIDS and the Bike shop….since we decided to name
the bike shop Uukumwe Nkurenkuru Bike Shop we decided to just name our
group that and thus the garden too:) Uukumwe means TOGETHER. The
ceremony for our first harvest was wonderful and I was so happy for
our volunteers because this was the first project that they had come
together to work on! We were able to provide food for 50 people and
also sold N$60 worth of veggies to the hospital staff. The donors
were present and recognized our need to expand our garden in order to
help more people so we will be receiving more funds soon!

I couldn't have been happier….after months of organizing, setbacks,
happy times working in the garden and many discussions about how we
were going to distribute this food everyone came together in the end
and rocked out the day. Markus was the Master of Ceremonies, Sam and
Joseph helped register the beneficiaries, and all of the volunteers
collected the cabbage for their clients. This is just the beginning
too! Only the cabbage was ready so we still have carrots, beet root
and onions to distribute and sell. Now that we have had our first
harvest it will just be open to the public to purchase food. We will
decide as a group what to do with that money: whether to buy seeds for
clients to start their own home gardens, purchase bread or porridge to
accompany the veggies…who knows, now that we are seeing the fruits of
our labor we can begin to dream bigger!

Pictures show some before and after shots of the garden….you may
remember some from an earlier post when we were first clearing the
space!

Next Wednesday the container of bikes that will become the Uukumwe
Nkurenkuru Bike Shop will be delivered and the mechanics training will
begin the following Monday. Four of the volunteers from our larger
committee will be trained for four weeks in bike maintenance and then
two weeks in shop management. After that point they will be in charge
of the business on a daily basis! Some bikes will be given for free to
the volunteers that do HIV/AIDS home base care or outreach on
HIV/AIDS, Malaria or TB and the rest of the bikes will be sold for
income generation. We're going to hire someone to build a fence
around the property so we can have a bit of security and plant some
fruit trees. The payment for the fence will be a new bike! As the
larger Uukumwe committee we will decide things such as price of the
bikes (we get to set our own price according to the needs and ability
of the local community), setting up a "volunteer to own" process for
those who may not be able to afford a bike, and what we will use the
extra income for- other projects etc.

With those two projects in full swing and 9 months in country I'm
finally starting to feel settled in. It's a great feeling and one I
was longing for for quite sometime:) Now I'm seeing that time is
about to start flying by!