Wednesday, 21 August 2013

Progress Report on the DiHoko Veggie Tunnel Project


The DiHokoHoko project is situated east of Rundu, 170 km, in Mukwe constituency, 30 km before you reach Divundu, close to the Kavango river border with Angola.

The DiHokoHoko Mission grounds are covered with very thick bushes. The project is setup on the church land and we started the project on 3 June 2013 with debushing and it was a very hard job. The debushing work started with 7 men include myself and it took almost 2 weeks to complete it. After debushing the place was still covered by stumps and grasses and leaves and sticks. The debushed area was almost a hector and half. 

Secondly we started with digging the stumps of 3 big trees and it was a very hard and tough job. To be able to get the big trees out we needed to dig deep, almost one meter and had to check which side it would fall to avoid an accident. Everyone was very serious and we did it even though the sand was very hard. The digging took us almost 3 weeks to finish. It took this time as it is a very sensitive issue to remove trees. We removed only the smaller ones that was in the way and that was not indigenous.

Apart from that the fence around the place needed to be fixed and the group of men went to fix the fence and cleaning and cutting bushes next to it, which took also 5 days.
After digging the big trees we cut them into pieces to be able to burn it and the open holes need to closed up and level it. We use the ash for composting. Then the place needed to be raked. It was also cleaned by taking out the grass and the leaves and the thorn sticks. We included 5 women to help do it while the men was cutting big trees into pieces and burning and closing holes. The women carried the leaves outside and threw it into a big hole where we will use it in future for compost. It took all of them 9 days before they finished.

Finally the place looks clean and we thank God for his help and good guidance and we thank uncle Albie who help a lot with finance. What a wonderful joy it is to see the project on the move.

Apart from this job we started with training with the trainer of gardeners (TOG) on 5-8-2013 and the training are going smooth with the 2 students Muronga Poulus and Thinyemba Laurence. We did all practical training and the first tunnel which we received was set up and plastics bags were filled with sand. The woman helped us to carry sand with buckets from the river, walking almost 2km to get the sand. This took them 5 days to complete.

Most of the pictures for the job are included and show how things were going.
We want to give thanks to God and ask for more blessings to be able to help our community to grow. The project took a lot of money to get it going and we thank God for giving us Albie, our partner in the finances and management.

Blessings.

Pastor Anton Mberema
DiHokoHoko

Photo story of the preparation process!
























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