Making life better

Making life better

Greetings!

Greetings from Tanzania!

It is raining now in Arusha. We can be hopeful the drought will end without disaster here, but there are still concerns.

In these times, with drought and uncertainty a part of life, it is wonderful to be continuing to make life better, home by home, family by family.

And while we carry on with these actions, we are thinking about bigger efforts and some innovations too. Read below for more.

Back in America, as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, we share our gratitude for your steadfast support. We are proud to share news of the progress that you make possible.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours,

Twende!

Robert Lange

November 2022

Responding to climate change, herdsmen learn new techniques at the International Collaborative feedlot

Livestock on the move

During the drought, many Rift Valley cows were taken up to the Ngorongoro Highlands where there was more grass than in the Valley.

Now the people are bringing the cows down again, as the farmers in the Highlands are ready to replant the land for food production.

But the thousands of cows we see on the journey as they pass through Mto wa Mbu are quite skinny.

We are all concerned and will be watching to see if returning home will provide what they need to get back to strength and health.

Our breeding herd will soon make the journey down from the Highlands. We took the herd up there before hardship hit the Valley, and our cows started out healthy and remain healthy.

They will soon face the same conditions as the others, but we have our stocked feedlot and our tractor equipped with a water tank trailer. We are prepared to keep our herd healthy in this difficult time.

A pond full of water ready for the new ICSEE water sanitation system

A surprising new water sanitation system

Water access remains a huge problem. The Maasai depend so much on rain-filled surface ponds and there are few bore-holes.

In the early ICSEE days in Zanzibar I had helped establish shallow wells dug with shovels and lots of hard work. But these are not possible in this district because the ground water is 150-200 meters below the surface. Drilling is the only way to get to it.

With all the recent drought, a lot of folks are living near dry ponds like this small one (pictured on the right), and waiting with their containers for a truck to come and give them their 40 liters a day.

So we and The Global Uplift Project were thrilled to find a pond full of water (pictured above this article) and a community ready to work with us to install one of our water sanitation systems at its edge. The women will soon be able to collect their 40 liters of clean and safe water every morning.

This is a good example of how we work. Of course, we think about the big picture and make plans that have a kind of scale and larger significance. But we never stop actions that just make life a little better each day.

At the same time, we explore future possibilities

Our collaborator ,Dr. Robert Van Buskirk, works in Malawi on basic life improvement in many ways similar to ours.

He also challenges himself-- and us-- to try new, if perhaps currently impractical, approaches.

One very important example is how we are exploring solar electric-powered cooking. Robert helped us import inexpensive solar panels and low-voltage, direct-current pressure cookers to try.

Going one step further, we sent two of our staff people to Malawi to work with the team there.

They have returned with an electric freight vehicle that Robert customized to recharge the batteries using a solar panel mounted on top-- as you see above.

We are having a wonderful time using it to deliver the bricks and stoves parts that the women install with the G-adventures travelers who visit us, and of course, it is a great hit.

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We are grateful for your steadfast support!