Giving a Vision and a Hope

Hi Everyone,
The group in the picture up above just left and wow oh wow - was it ever a busy week, but we're all excited to see what was accomplished in the short time that they were here. We partner with another ministry called "SSE" (Self-Sustaining Enterprises) and this group in their home church in Ohio partner with SSE so we all worked together with a common purpose. SSE tries to bring small businesses for the people in the village to help them become self-sustaining. These Christians came with monies to help with two projects. The first one is the picture below. An old storage shed on our OCC property was converted into a chicken coop and one of the men from the village was trained in caring for the chickens and in a few months these once baby chicks (they are now almost two months old) will be sold to restaurants and to private companies for them to use and the monies will go back into the ministry for more chickens and hopefully this will expand and other villagers can start their own chicken businesses. Solomon, the young man now caring for the chickens is very very excited to be a part of this new venture. He told another B2B staffer that he recently woke up in the middle of the night really "happy." He now has a vision and a hope.

But, the most exciting thing that this team did this past week was to build a test model aquaponics system that we hope will one day completely revolutionize the way the villagers will do their farming. Several on this team have much experience and did much research before coming to Nigeria and they purchased the materials needed and in the pictures below you can see the process that took place.

They first built a large slightly slanted table 32 feet long, covered it with a heavy industrial material then a heavy plastic put on top of that. They then filled the table with rock chips about four inches deep.

The table is angled down towards a large tub (spa sized) which contains water and 200 catfish fingerlings. They feed the catfish, the catfish poop and the wastes and water is recirculated through a filter which removes the solid waste and allows the nutrient filled water to cover the whole table which then drains back into the pool. In the rocks are little green squares of a material that will help germinate the seed that has been planted inside this pourous square. To begin with we they planted some tomatoe seeds and lettuce seeds. The lettuce will be ready to pick in 30 days and the tomatoes slightly longer and will be ongoing. The benefits to the community if this project succeeds and then can be replicated, will be life-changing. Even in the dry season (which lasts six months), villages can still produce crops that can be sold to earn income. Within two days after the construction, we could already see a little shoot popping up from one of the lettuce seeds - see one of the pictures below.

The last thing the team did was build a plastic covering over the entire table which still allows the sun to get in but will keep rains from hurting the crops. A solar panel was purchased which will charge the battery which is used to power the three pumps that aireates the water and recirculates the water through the vegetation. Many people helped in this week's building of the aquaponics and some days there were several people from the village watching and hoping, I'm sure, that this might help their economy and families. We sure would appreciate your prayers toward this end. It's time for the people in Kisayhip Village to have a future and a hope!!

Proverbs 29:18 says, "Where there is no vision, the people will perish."

In-joy,

Eileen and Crist