At the beginning of February Alice, Martin and two volunteers started a 3-day working trip to Arusha. Goals of the trip were to visit"ECHO"quot; farm and a camel keeper. ECHO has a similar vision to ours: To demonstrate and teach sustainability, permaculture, Farming God's Way, etc. to locals in order to
fight hunger, poverty and deforestation. Like us, they also focus their whole project on God. As we visited the farm, they gave us a tour. It was very nice to see that there are also many old, big trees growing on the farm, which unfortunately do not exist in Dodoma anymore. The tour was very exciting, we were able to learn many new things, and it was encouraging to see how great God is
working here as well. One of the most interesting things was their refrigerated seed bank, which impressed us all very much. We may eventually build one when we build the new tree nursery offices. Their tree nursery is huge, but clearly divided. They grow an incredible number of different plant species, creating a huge diversity. We were able to pick up a few things here as well that we want to implement into our nursery. Since they have so many different species, we were able to purchase many trees, vegetables, and flowers that we don't have on the farm yet, increasing our diversity as well. Overall, it was a very enriching and encouraging visit.
Afterwards, we went straight to see camels. Since Alice wants to bring camels to the farm, this was an excellent opportunity to learn more about camels and their husbandry. We had a very enriching conversation with the camel keeper and through the visit we got ideas how our project could work. Beforehand we were unsure if we could do it at all, but after it, this project seems pretty realistic. A very uplifting and informative visit with a good prospect that one day camels will walk across our farm....
