Patience is required

Sometimes things are not going as planned, this period was one of them. We had the disappointment of not getting the BCS rotavator from Joburg in December. For some of you who do not know what a rotovator is, this is a small tiller that cultivates land. (See video below and hit the like button) It's easy to transport and very handy for small farmers. We drove all the way to JHB for nothing,they just sold it before we arrived. This means we drove 1200km for absolutely nothing and that you cannot trust someone's word. Sadly I knew that already. Anyways it was frustrating. However patience is a biblical virtue, we trusted God to provide us with something else and he did!

After looking on the internet I found something similar in Holland, one of our friends and a passionate Charibiz volunteer named Peter was kind enough to look for me in Holland. He was so enthusiastic that he bought it on behalf of Charibiz! What a blessing he is, unfortunately it takes some time for it to arrive and there is some admin involved in the transport. So in the meantime I needed to look for a "cheaper" option that would be able to benefit Charibiz community projects and its beneficiaries and not slow the progress down.

After weeks of delay and working with some good old fashion hand tools.....It took some time but we finally got our demo of the husqvarna tr 530 see the video below. We found out that you can do about 10 m2 per hours of cultivation with hand tools. This if you work very hard, the rotovator below will make that job a bit quicker and we can now do it now about 7 times faster per hour. In the meantime we are waiting and looking forward to our Ferrari rotavator that has double the power! Exciting!

The challenge for us as Charibiz arises, you can use big tractors to make the job easier but this is not realistic in the eyes of our beneficiaries. Starting to farm is by the sweat of your brow (Gen 3:19). We believe you have to start small and grow, the small rotavator is nice jump from a potential farmer to a subsistence farmer and from a subsistence farmer to a emerging farmer, to achieve the ultimate goal of commercial farmer. We see our trainee's gaining more and more knowledge and slowly but surely we are trying to create a long term vision for our trainee's instead of a day to day living. It's hard thing to change!

In the meantime we are busy clearing the land and doing some practical lessons. Composting will start soon!