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Lessons from the Ground Up
Ian Langrish, a Geography teacher from South-West London, spent 10 days visiting our projects in South Eastern Kenya. These are his thoughts on his trip, and the relevance of our work to the teaching of Geography.
Water on tap and readily available is something that we here in the UK take for granted and utilise every day without really thinking twice about. The prospect of spending several hours a day walking up to twenty kilometres to queue up and wait in turn with many others to collect just twenty or so litres of this vital commodity is well beyond most people’s experiences. To witness a five year old child carrying a ten kilogramme full water container as a regular part of her daily routine brings home the reality of just how harsh life can be for many Africans during the dry season. Following my recent visit with Excellent Development to their community based projects in South West Kenya, the impact that a lack of water has on people’s everyday existence in the semi-arid tropics is something of which I’m now far more conscious, plus just how much of a positive impact the work of Excellent Development has on the communities and the areas in which it works. What this visit also brought home to me was the very powerful effect of empowering people to positively improve their own lives through their collective efforts to work towards common goals to solve their everyday problems. Here’s just a flavour of some my further experiences via my diary notes for Thursday 21st August: "Visited Matondoni self help community group who were preparing to build their third sand dam the following day. This group was formed in 2006 and have already built two sand dams and terraced much of the surrounding farmland belonging to their 23 members. Dam preparation work is very labour intensive with half a dozen women digging out sand from the existing stream bed and transferring it in old cement bags some 100 metres downstream to the dam construction site. Meanwhile the men were manually breaking up rocks from the stream bed to use as hard core fill in the dam wall. Having explained what they were doing and after a meeting with their field officer Timothy to finalise the dam construction details Jenine (my wife) and I were invited to partake in their “chai” (tea) break. We then climbed up out of the river valley to be given a guided tour around Simon and Patricia’s Shamba (farm) where had planted over 100 different fruit trees along the edge of their farm terraces. The banana and mango trees have yet to fully mature but their papaya trees were cropping healthily. "Each tree is planted in a 2 foot deep hole which is filled with compost and cow dung (to help soil moisture retention) and needs watering every 2-3 days for the first 6 months to ensure that the tree survives. This irrigation requires manually carrying water some 300 metres uphill from the river valley below (something that would not be feasible were it not for the water retention provided by the sand dams built across the valley!) Cow dung was provided by their two cows (less valuable non-reproducing bulls) but this was limited by the lack of fodder they had to feed them. They had also planted trees around the edge of their Shamba to provide shade (to reduce evaporation losses) and eventually a supply of fuel wood. "One frustrating problem they faced was aphid infestation of their cow pea crop as they were unable to afford pesticides to counter this. We learnt earlier in the week how intercropping tomatoes with onions acted as a natural deterrent for some insect pests. "Simon and Patricia were rightly proud of what they had achieved so far and the amount of hard work they had put into their farm, with digging several 100 metre long 2 metre high terraces and planting so many trees. Their food supply had increased but they had only just harvested enough maize this year to feed their family (11 children!!) and had yet to produce a surplus that they could sell to generate further income to invest in their farm. They will surely reap the fruits of their labour in the not too distant future! We therefore found it very humbling that they sent us on our way with two enormous papaya fruits as a gesture for our visit." This visit above all of the farmers that we encountered in our ten day trip with Excellent Development brought home the fragility of these people’s lives and their dependence on their surrounding environment. But despite this they were striving to improve their lives through improving their access to water and food security, via applying the agricultural improvement techniques they had learned through their membership of the Matondoni self-help group supported by Excellent Development. Geography Lessons Self-help in most geography teaching contexts relates to upgrading and improving low quality shanty town type housing areas in developing cities. However ED's self-help development philosophy equally has had very significant impacts that can be used in a wide variety of contexts in the classroom. The construction of sand dams, digging farm terraces, tree planting and seed bank programmes, building rainwater harvesting tanks for schools as well as providing technical expertise for all of these projects are all practical examples of their work that can be used in the classroom to illustrate a wide variety of geographical themes. These include sustainable development, agricultural improvement and development issues, soil and water conservation methodologies as well as more general development issues regarding 'top-down' government initiatives versus 'bottom-up' community based strategies. This can be applied right across all Key Stages from introducing the basic ideas and concepts of sustainable development in KS3 to applied topics such as Agriculture and Food and Development Issues at A2 level. In addition to the existing film DVD of Excellent's work 'Walking on Water' and the related teachers support resource materials that are available, Excellent Development's Annual Report, available here, provides valuable background information and explanations of examples of the work carried out with local community groups that can be used to generate further teaching and learning materials.
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