A Meeting Under The Ole Mango Tree

Tuesday, June 4, 2013 at around 1 pm

This morning marked our second trip to the village we visited yesterday to talk more about their current projects and future plans.

Not strangers this time, we were greeted with singing and dancing, smiles and friendly handshakes as the powers that be decided today’s meeting would be under the mango tree and not in the house.

The furniture got moved outside, chairs borrowed from some invisible place and before long all 20 members of the co-op were ready to go.

Their hope is to rent two acres of land and grow watermelons, a valued cash crop. Person after person walked through the proposed project step by step, figuring the cost of everything from land to seeds to fertilizers, figuring where they can save money (like doing every ounce of labor themselves) and figuring the expected yields and costs received at market.

In short, a $350 investment is expected to return $1800 per acre per crop.

That’s crazy!

And we talked about other stuff too – like expanding the tiny chicken coop so that the poultry end of this co-op can also grow – with their tiny coop (coop, not co-op) they sold 30 roosters last Christmas (buying time for roosters here) at, I wanna say, $7.00 a rooster.....and they’d like to build a much larger coop and eventually, through breeding, get to 500 total chickens)....and using the same system of walking through it all one step at a time( who knew there was so much detail to chickens??? – corrugated iron sheets of x size, the price of a large tree that would then be cut by the folks into posts and a door, nails, chicken wire, vaccinations), the cost estimate  for a 29’ x 16’ coop came to under $400.

Wow.

At the end, the spokesman wanted to say why they started the co-op.

He explained each has their own farm land, but all wanted to do more for their family than they could manage alone, like send the kids to school (it’s not free here), buy them food so they can eat more than once per day (the average for most folks here) and see if together they could do together what they cannot alone.

But it didn’t stop with their immediate needs or immediate family.

They wanted to have resources to help widows and orphans, a sad epidemic here due to AIDS/HIV; and they wanted to improve the larger community.

I filmed much of what happened today. You’ll see some of it when I get back.

The presence of God, in the company of people who do so much with so little, under the shade of a mango tree, was, today, palpable.