Yesterday, I took a trip to Mbale with our school's Head of Department for Agriculture, Mr. Francis Kagodo to purchase supplies for our 7-acre planned plot of corn and beans. The intent of this project is both to give the students practical experience in agriculture and practice controlled experiments, testing different fertilizers, herbicides, genetically modified seeds, etc. as well as provide lunch for the students when the crop is mature enough to harvest, grind, and consume as posho and beans.
What is posho you say? It's raw corn ground up in a very fine flour, mixed with water and boiled at high heat to create a sort of chunk-like (can't think of any other way to describe it) food that you eat with beans. It's my least favorite food in Uganda. It's also what I eat everyday at my school.
Plow the fields, I think the kid is there just to look cool and hit the bulls
Buy seeds, in this case beans
Transport via ghetto wheel barrows
What are they tranporting you ask? Well, let me tell you...
4 - 50 kg bags of fertilizer, yeah, that's 440 pounds
5 - 20 kg bags of maize seeds
1 - 50 kg bag of beans
Watch other people do the work, my favorite part
The picture above is of Francis. We literally did almost nothing to transport all of this. It was great. We just hired these guys to do all the heavy lifting for less than a dollar each.
Load onto taxi
Wait 3.5 hours for taxi to leave, this smile was so forced, Francis' expression is much more accurate
Lock safe and secure in Joe's office
Line item expenses (in Ug sh):
Fertilizer 440,000
Plowing 180,000
Transport 36,000
Corn seed 100,000
Sprayer 70,000
Planting lines 15,000
Herbicide 17,500
Bean seed 125,000
Total 983,500
About $410.
Next step: Hire (without pay) 500 secondary students to plant the seeds and fertilizer. We start Monday!
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