Opok Farm 2007 Part 1: Update from the fields

Christina Jordan — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:05:20 GMT

The Opok Farms group was just featured in the Razoo bi-weekly digest, so I thought it high time to update you all with where we're at with this project. Still in search of the best platform to use for discussion about all this, for the time being I'm cross-posting this update at facebook, ned.com, and on the Razoo Resettlement for child-headed households: Uganda community blog. Linda will hopefully also post these updates on GiveMeaning.com where the proposal we put together on Razoo is currently live for funding. If you're a member of more than one of those networks, please feel free to respond wherever you feel most comfortable.

There's actually lots of news to share, so this update is broken into in 3
parts that I hope to get out within the next couple of days. First an update
from the farm fields - see below! Sometime early next week I'll post an update
on plans for theOpok Farms Community, and then a roundup of the virtual community that's been rallying so enthusiastically around this initiative.

Part 1: Update from the fields

July -September of this year, we hired in labor to clear and plant 65 acres
of land that had lain fallow for the past 2 decades. The first harvest should be
starting within a month or so - groundnuts (peanuts in the USA) will be
the first crop to be ready. Week before last, my kids and I went up to Gulu to escape the crazy CHOGM meetings in Kampala, and the two older boys got to camp out at the Opok Farms worker's camp for two nights. What fun! There are
pictures over here, where you can see the fields and get a feel for how about 15 of the workers are currently living there full time - another 5-10
workers come in regularly on foot or by bicycle.

The sunflower crop is just lovely with lots of bees buzzing everywhere, the
cassava is doing better now that it's been weeded, and the groundnut crop is thriving with this year's extra rains. The bad news is that we've lost almost all 12 acres of yellow beans we'd planted. The general consensus seems to be that the fields they were planted in needed another plowing. Weeds took them over too quickly and all the leaves turned yellow with brown spots. Weeding the fields is taking up most of the workers' time - since this is the first time the land has been planted in 20 years, there's a lot of extra stuff in the soil. The variety of weeds is amazing! We've also got maize growing, but termites seem to be eating quite a lot of it. (BTW - It's on my list of things to do to look up some organic repellants for termites. If anyone with better connectivity than I have would be interested in researching that, it would be of such great help!)

There's lots of dead wood around the forest, so selling firewood and burning
already dead wood into charcoal is keeping the workers paid until the harvest
comes. We're all very excited that my mom is bringing a new chainsaw in her suitcase when she comes to Uganda for Christmas - she can buy a highly recommended one in the USA for an amazing $169 - that's a whopping $600 less than the cheapest one we've found in Uganda! Voila - a small but significant first investment in farm machinery at Opok that will really help alot. We're also thinking bicycles would help to make the firewood
collection easier.

The biggest persistent challenge on the farm is that so many strangers
are cutting down our living forest to burn charcoal. Clear-cutting for
charcoal is definitely illegal in Uganda, but there are no local law enforcement resources available to send out into the wilderness to help us, and
the culprits simply don't stop when Norbert or the workers confront them and ask them to. So they (a faceless many) are able to keep cutting down acre upon acre of virgin forest. It's tremendously sad to see the forest destroyed, and leaves me with a very helpless feeling to see it get so much worse every time I visit.

Several more strangers have also moved in and planted their own fields.
Heated discussions about the farm boundary, or people claiming that Norbert's
granddad had given pieces of land away to their granddads have taken up a lot of time and seem to go nowhere toward resolution. Coming from a Western culture where private property is usually respected, it's sometimes frustrating for me personally to understand the disregard for private property rights that seems to reign. That we'd hoped to protect the environment within the farm boundary is simply meaningless to the local population, and the more we appeal to local authorities for help, the more political it all seems to unfortunately get. We are trying to at least introduce some rules for how people living within the farm boundary should agree to use the land, but it's tough.

A few weeks back, the workers were surprised to wake up and find piles of
elephant dung on the road, about 25m from where they sleep. They estimated that 10 or more elephants had passed by in the night. So far, we haven't had any sightings reported of actual elephants - only their leavings. And fortunately, it doesn't look like they've done any damage at all to the fields.

All in all, things go well out on the farm. If the new ebola outbreak doesn't
keep us from traveling after Christmas, the boys are planning another family
campout at the farm (with Grandma and their two cousins this time) just after
the New Year. Stay tuned for some harvest pictures around then!

Meanwhile, earlier this week I attended a presentation at UNICEF by the
SWAY-Uganda research team. Anyone with an interest in the issues surrounding war affected youth in Northern Uganda will definitely be interested in their findings. More about the relevance of that report on what we've got planned for the Opok Farms Community in the next part of this update.

Hoping all is well wherever you are...

Christina

http://lifeinafrica.com

Life in Africa ~ ever changing

Christina Jordan — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:08:43 GMT

In addition to finding new homes online after the closure of Omidyar.net, we're making some significant structural changes offline at Life in Africa these days, that give the communities in Uganda more ownership and set the stage for expanding LiA's unique Webbed Empowerment services to other communities in the East African region.

As December begins, we're in the final stages of refining some existing member programs and designing some new ones, all targeted to launch under the newly restructured Life in Africa WE Network in the early part of 2008. Until then, assistance for educating orphans dependent on our member households is currently our Ugandan communities' number one urgent need. Please visit the
School Fees 2008 Campaign page, to see the cool crafts you can buy and other actions you can take to help us reach as much of our Phase 1 goal as we can by February. Every tiny bit you can do helps at this point!

Additional actions you can take to connect with impact through LiA's full range of member services programs will be added to Life in Africa's webbed spaces here at Razoo, at Facebook and at Ned.com after the new year. I know that all of your input on how to make that work is going to be invaluable!

To get started with us on this new virtual journey, please join us in the Life in Africa group discussion space here at Razoo to chat about what else we've been up to lately. You might also consider visiting the Click4Africa group here on Razoo, where John Powers and I have been discovering some ways you can spend time online supporting other initiatives in Africa.

Finally, please be sure to tell your friends about LifeInAfrica.com – especially if you think they'll like what you see in the Community Crafts Shop! The site was down for a few months as we were changing things offline, so we could really use a boost to get our visitor count back up.

Thank you for being here!

Christina Jordan's Blog

Opok Farm 2007 Part 1: Update from the fields

Life in Africa ~ ever changing