Mwasembe Testimony

My name is Wiliadi Halidi Mwasembe. I come from Luhanga in Mbarali district in Mbeya region. First of all, I would like to thank the God of Heaven for allowing me to be part of the Care of Creation Tanzania project here. When I came here to Dodoma in September 2017, the area here was completely empty and devastated. There were no buildings nor roads, no trees, everything had been chopped down for coal production. The earth was depleted. There were only three shallow well holes from which the locals could draw water. Often these holes also dried up, so the villagers had to wait a long time to get water, or even went without. I grew up farming, but when I came here, I realized that my previous way of farming was just a waste of time. I had always farmed large areas but harvested very little. I had always worked the soil with a hoe or plow, but could not afford fertilizer because of the high price. When we started here in September 2017, we first prepared three comparison fields - one in the traditional way, one with modern farming, and one with "farming God's way." In the "God's way" field, we planted corn and covered it with mulch (we call it "God's blanket"). We planted the other two fields with the same amount of seeds as well, but did not use mulch, instead using the appropriate other access methods. All fields were planted on the same day. Another comparison field was planted to peanuts using all three planting techniques. Rain began to fall in mid-November, but then stopped until late December. In the peanut field that we planted according to God's way, the peanut plants could endure the whole month of drought, and in the end we could harvest three buckets of peanuts in this field (6x7m). The field according to modern agriculture and the one according to traditional method had to be reseeded at the beginning of January, because all the seedlings had dried up. Accordingly, the yields were also lower, with the modern agriculture still 2 buckets, with the traditional field not even quite a bucket. The locals had predicted that we would not harvest anything, and I myself had been full of doubts, because the soil had been so hard that we had to work with a pickaxe. But in the end, I knew that farming God's way can work even under these hard conditions like little rain and hard soil.