Truck arrives at Lusekele

The first chapter of the ACDI truck saga ended this morning. On March 7th MIVA Suisse, a Catholic Christian mission devoted to solving transportation and communication problems for church projects around the world, approved ACDI's proposal to purchase a small transport truck. An unlikely coalition of American Baptist churches and individuals joined in the projet. emptytomb, a Champaign, IL-based foundation promoting increased commitment to God's global mission, added another $8.000 to the gifts of local congregations. And this morning, nearly eight months later, Timothée Kabila pulled up to the Lusekele depot, riding shotgun at the end the truck's maiden voyage, Kinshasa to Lusekele, carrying a load of supplies for the Vanga Evangelical Hospital.

For the past two weeks Timothée has been working feverishly to secure the final documents for the truck. Bureaucracy grinds slowly in the best of times. "Come back tomorrow" is the mantra of the licensing bureau clerk. A firm tone and persistant spirit win out in the end, but the trial tests one's patience.


So the Lusekele staff start off a new week with one tangible sign of God's accompanying presence. A new chapter, one of promise and challenge, opens. The truck is nothing more than an instrument. It's immediate purpose is three-fold: provide a reliable and reasonably priced transport for hospital and health zone supplies; give farmers a better profit margin by offering regular farm-to-processor transportation for manioc and oil palm fruit; provide ACDI Lusekele with a steady supply of agricultural raw materials for processing. The wholeness and well-being of people is the real objective though. If in four years hundreds of local families can say they are better off because of this truck we will be satisfied. It is simply a fruit of God's deep and abiding love for people.

The Vegetable Seed Lady

Planting season is a slow time for me and literacy classes in rural Congo. If they don’t stop altogether for those weeks, they usually slow down to maybe a review class per week to keep students from forgetting. In cities, people like following the academic calendar. So we throw a big International Literacy Day celebration in Kinshasa every year for publicity purposes and to encourage participants. This year we will celebrate 10 years of working together. We’ve got a refresher seminar for teachers planned for this weekend in Kinshasa and are working on the details for a teacher-training in Boma, a port city near the ocean.

In the meantime, my hands are full preparing and selling garden seeds. In the 80s Lusekele was the main garden seed source for all of Bandundu province, and, though Center attention has moved to other things, it is remembered and people still ask for seeds from Lusekele agents. Dry season is prime time for vegetable gardens, when people can’t forage for wild greens and manioc greens get scarce and tough.

One doesn’t make much money selling seed at the prices village people are willing to buy them at (4-9 cents/ package), but I see it as a service. In the past 2 months I’ve prepared and sold somewhere around 550 packages of seeds for amaranth greens, bilolo (a popular broad-leafed green in the eggplant family), chili peppers, tomato and malabar spinach. I’ve not been able to supply requests for collard seeds, cabbage, okra, eggplant and celery seeds. In the case of celery, the seed viability in our heat and humidity is too short for unrefrigerated seeds.

My most enthusiastic customers are Vanga Hospital patients and their helpers, from all over the region. I get mobbed every time I go there. As I sell, I dispense gardening advice: prepare a special seedbed for your seeds up off the ground so that wandering chickens, goats, pigs or grasshoppers don’t kill the majority of sprouts before they get strong enough, and so that you can take better care of them.

Green Revolution Possible -- with a fight

A green revolution is so tantalizingly close in Congo . . . and still so very far away. New high yielding varieties of manioc, peanuts, cowpeas and corn could easily DOUBLE food production if adopted widely. But few farmers know they exist. For government representatives and officials, "Agriculture: priority number one!" is just a catchy slogan. Money for agricultural research and extension programs is never allocated. Most farmers never see an extension agent except when they are collecting taxes. Rural people remain in the dark. A small measure of prosperity remains an elusive dream. And those on the margins still scramble for daily bread.

In the meantime, Christians are committed to making at least a small difference in the Vanga area. ACDI's 4 extension agents make over 120 farm visits per month, sharing information and arranging for people to try the new varieties. Putting new technologies in the hands of farmers is simply a matter of making the connections and sharing seeds. Accepting the rutted roads, the river crossings, the bamboo mat for a bed is the cost of giving people hope.

The payoff? Small glimmers of hope begin to shine in people's lives -- God's offer of a green revolution that should be available to all. Here are some vignettes from the ACDI Lusekele notebook:

Mama Kinzuiy Munganga is married to a man in Mboma who has two wives. She has young children. A few years ago she was living a hand-to-mouth existence. She and the second wife worked for other women, hoeing fields, doing other chores. They both had a reputation for being lazy. The women paid her in manioc and seldom paid well. Her children really didn't get enough to eat and they never had enough money to pay for school.

ACDI was working with a farmer's association in Mboma promoting two simple changes -- a new variety of high-yielding peanut and several new disease-resistant manioc. For the first time many of her neighbors were producing surpluses from their tired out fields. Mama Kinzuiy saw the results and decided to join the group. That first year she learned (maybe for the first time) about growing a crop you are proud of and that satisfies your family's needs. The new varieties wowed her with a surplus. She redoubled her effort.

The next year her husband joined the group. And then his second wife followed. Within a couple of years they were regularly producing enough for the growing family and surpluses for sale. With the example and encouragement of the group, these two women with a reputation for laziness (probably more the result of resignation to the inevitability of poor harvests) became two responsible providers for their family.

Today Mama Munganga makes sure her children have enough to eat. She sends them to school. She even dares to dream that their lives will be different from the life that she was leading them toward just a few years ago.

Tata Mukobo is small man, with a wooly gray beard and an engaging smile. He has two families. Years and years ago he married and quickly had a passle of young children. Life was poor and hard. Tata Mukobo scrabbled to feed his family. School was hit and miss for the kids. Difficulty upon difficulty finally broke up that marriage. The kids are grown, the oldest having kids of their own. They have settled into the familiar, demanding life of subsistence farming. Without education their options are limited.

After the demise of the first marriage, Tata Mukobo married a younger women. She expected to have children of her own -- and she did. A few years later Tata Mukobo and a few friends formed a farmer's association to do some cooperative farming -- knowledge, strength and security in numbers perhaps. In 2002 the association fell in with ACDI Lusekele in order to try 4 new disease-tolerant, high-yielding varieties of manioc. Armed with better planting material and regular advice on best farming practices from a Lusekele extension agent, the group surprised even themselves with a bumper manioc crop, easily 3 times what they had been producing before.

They moved on to a high-yielding variety of peanuts and much better harvest. In 2004 Tata Mukobo planted some new high-yielding oil palm trees and continued with the new peanuts and manioc. This year the palms are really beginning to produce nuts. Surpluses and new oil production mean that the family eats better and the younger kids, the second family, are going to school now. And Tata Mukobo has even recovered some ground for his first family. The youngest finally finished high school. Farming income paid for his first year of university, a new door of opportunity.

Kapita Gabi lives in Wamba. He and his wife have 6 growing kids. The oldest two are in their last year of high school and the youngest is 6. The family started growing new high-yielding manioc in 2004. In four years they have literally put a roof over their head and sent the kids to school. This year they built a new house out of adobe bricks. Bricks can be (and were) made by hand ("sweat equity"). But manioc and peanut surpluses paid for the tin sheeting for the roof. Kapita has contributed money for his youngest
brother to go to college.

Kintibidi of Longo, near Djuma, moved out of his village when disputes in the extended family starting gnawing his family's well-being. He came 40 kms to Lusekele to get manioc seed cuttings from ACDI when he heard about the new "miracle" varieties. He planted a small multiplication field and the next year supplied the whole village with cuttings. His farmer's association continued with several big multiplication fields which provided thousands of meters of new cuttings. They sold those to farmers from other areas for a big profit. And with the income he was able to secure rights to a farm of 32 acres. In rural Congo that makes him a wealthy person. He is now working on establishing a small plantation of oil palms.

Secure water supply in the village again -- after 35 years!

Lusekele was built as a farmer training school in the early 1960s. Classrooms, housing for staff and workers, complete water system, generator electricity, labs, a fully equipped farm garage, workshops. But government commitment to training farmers soon waned. Conscientious leaders scrambled to keep the center open by trading Lusekele's wealth in equipment for operating funds. Less scrupulous leaders sold the family jewels to enrich themselves. A decade later, when the Baptist Convention of Congo agreed to base its small farm resource center and extension program at Lusekele, little but the land and buildings was left.

In 1985 when I arrived here for the first time, the remains of an old belt-driven Stork piston water pump lay in the overgrown ruins of a pump house -- no motor, no roof on the shelter, no connecting pipes. Roof-fed cisterns were the only source of clean drinking water. Irrigation was a wild dream. During the dry season workers' children carried household water from a swamp-side spring over a mile away. The water isn't always clean.

Yesterday, water flowed from the Kwilu River 500 meters to a storage tank in the middle of the center for first time in 35 years. This storage tank feeds 2 small irrigation lines for dry season seed production and hose irrigation in our demonstration garden. A little further down the line, the pipe feeds a biosand water filter that will give clean drinking and cooking water for the 20 worker's households (over 100 people) that live here.
The line continues on to the the manioc soaking bins, where ACDI processes high-quality manioc chips. Another line feeds a storage tank next the palm digester, putting us one step closer to improving the oil palm extraction operation.

Timothée Kabila caught my attention this morning. "The water system is like a corn seed," he said. "With a little care it will mature. Eventually it will begin to multiply, producing seeds of other good changes here at Lusekele." We are content for the moment to celebrate water in the village. But ultimately, I expect water to bring new life and hope to ACDI and the people we serve.

One more step forward

Two years ago five friends from Oregon and Illinois visited Lusekele and help put a roof over a large water storage tank, a key feature of the planned irrigation / dringking water system for the agricultural center. We all expected to install a pump and system piping a few weeks later. Instead we embarked on a two-year odyssey. But that odyssey is almost at an end.

Last week the pump and motor were installed in the refurbished pump house. By Tuesday morning (Sept 2) the major plumbing around the pump and the first 50 feet of piping up the hill were installed. That afternoon the Orbit pump pushed the first few gallons of water through the pipe.


Wednesday we worked out kinks with the system. The team laid the first 200 meters of pipe and installed two connection boxes.

This morning the team plans to glue the remaining 280 meters of pipe. Of course there are still a few dozen items to clear before the system will be fully functional, but we should be able to try a full test sometime next week. Imagine the celebration of that first water in the tank.

Early rainy season

(Prepared August 15, posting delayed by temporary failure of internet service . . . So what else is new?)

The rain came in unexpectedly, a few drops tapping on the forest leaves as Jean Luc and I came back up from the pump house. Then as we checked a support piece for the pump, the sky grew darker and big drops started to plop on my back. A few minutes later the Lusekele kids came running back from the peanut fields, soaked to the skin but thoroughly enjoying the sheets falling from the sky, the puddles and a break from the fields. Of course any runoff from the roof means fewer trips off to the spring, so the kids were collecting the little streams in small buckets or plastic jugs.

I guess rainy season has really arrived. Already two big rains have fallen since the beginning of August. With the second big rain about 4 days ago the scramble to plant fields began. But it's so early. The season usually starts rolling along about the last week in August. There is still a risk that this is just a false start. But the third rain yesterday guarantees that there will be enough moisture to keep germinating peanuts alive and growing.


The bathroom water barrel is dark gray from the field-burning soot washed off the roof. But people aren't complaining. Water from the sky is a lot less trouble than walking to the spring over a kilometer away.

In another couple of weeks, the trek to the spring may be history. The water pump that Spokane Valley Baptist Church helped buy finally arrived last weekend. If the young boys finish breaking rock for gravel, the pumphouse floor can be poured on Monday. Then, we can start installing the pipeline to the tank that our Missionary Partnership Team and friends helped cover two summers ago. The reading in chapel this morning was from Psalm 107: "Thank the Lord, for He is good, His love for us endures forever. Let all people whom the Lord has saved praise Him." Nice reminder.

Land ! Land ! We need land !

Today is a Congolese holiday. Still, 15 minutes after chapel, John the IT tech had our replacement wireless radio ready to go back up into the tree. The climbing rope was already in place and Yulu was putting on the safety harness to climb the 60 dizzying feet to the antenna mount. Forty minutes later the antenna mast was in place and John confirmed that we had a good signal. The internet is back up and running after nearly 2 weeks down.

A holiday morning should be a good time for thinking about the details of an extension database, don't you think? The office is quiet. Interruptions can be avoided. Well, not this morning. The problem is land. Songo, the village between Lusekele and Vanga, has run out. There isn't enough land for everybody to plant fields like they want to. Perhaps inevitably, some people think that the only way to survive is to squat on the land of other people and hope to avoid eviction before the harvest.

For at least ten years families with land bordering the Lusekele concession have tested ACDI's resolve to protect its land. The ACDI staff have tried to resolve the disputes reasonably, peacefully. They have appealed to the church's legal title to the land. They have trotted out the original traditional agreements made with land chiefs. They have even had the governor defend ACDI's right to the land. Local justice can be brutal. Christian compassion often counseled patience. Police beatings and fines would fall on poor families ill-fixed to handle additional troubles. Usually the incursions last a single planting season.

But one family seems to be playing for much higher stakes. They have cleared fields on concession land three years running. Deaf to reason they have begun to clear Lusekele forest again this year. And they upped the ante by claiming that ACDI has illegally occupied half the concession (nearly 125 acres) that really belongs to the people of Songo. The riot that interrupted my database reflections this morning came from the land chiefs from a rival village on the other side of Lusekele.

"If ACDI can't put an end to the incursions by Songo people, we will," the assistant chef yelled, veins popping on his throat. Timothée narrowly averted an informal mélée between the two factions. For ten minutes abuse was hurled back and forth until people had vented a store of frustration. But it shows that producing more food from a fixed portion of land is not just an interesting problem in agronomy. Land is life for people depending almost completely on agriculture for their livelihood.

Every field has to produce more AND produce it more often. Subsistence rain-fed agriculture in our area yields 10% to 20% of what an expert North American farmer does, sometimes less. Reserve land that can be left in soil building fallow is already a forgotten luxury for the people of Songo. More efficient crop varieties can mean higher yields where nutrients are scarce. Soil building legume plants can speed up rebuilding soil nutrients. Closer attention to best farming practices can boost results too.

We need more time before subsistence farmers reach the breaking point. Songo "leaders" this morning asked, "What is ACDI going to do to satisfy our need for fields?" The real answer is let's all learn better ways to farm and nurture the land as quickly as we can. Further incursions on concession land threatens to compromise ACDI's research and extension activities. They distract extension staff from helping people focus on better farming. They undermine ACDI's efforts to generate income that supports research and extension activities. They degrade the last remnants of forest reserve in the area. And if they continue they will provoke inter-village violence.

We pray that people can stay focused, adopting proven improvements in farming and using the land God gave us much more efficiently.