Beyond Borders: Plant garden, plant hope

For 2 lovely sunny days we've been digging garden for RFM employee Zakhele and his family in Bethany together with Kevin, professor in University of Nazarene, and my Danish roomiefriends Ida and Trina. The place is some tens of kilometers away from Manzini surrounded by beautiful mountains, grassfields and small forests. On a small piece of land big family lives in two two-room flats luckily at least with electricity which is not the case in big amount of homesteads in Swaziland, but without running water which on the contrary is very common. Maize that was planted before had died because of lack of water. Girls of the family go every day to get some water from kilometers away and that needs to adequate for a big family to cooking, drinking, bathing, doing laundry, and so on. Once more I'm reminded how much water is wasted in Finland and how self-evident water is. Main projects currently in this family therefore are building a water pipe, together with building a dry toilet, eaves for the roofs to gather rain water and constracting a chicken house. You can see the current chicken house in back of this picture.

We had delicious rice and chicken for lunch prepared by the 16-year sister of Zakhele. The preparation of lunch included chasing a chicken, cutting its head and taking the leathers off. The freshest chicken I've ever eaten! In this picture you can see our master chef killing the chicken with his brother.

All the pieces of chicken are eatable, such as the legs, bone marrows and brain and other organs.

Here Zakheles' mother is handcrafting one beautiful basket for the chickens out of grass only without any strings or glue, how amazing skills!

Maize is riped off the ears by hand, dried in the sun and then taken to miller, who pulverizes it. Cheeper flour than what they sell in shops, but a lot of work!