Sowing the seeds of the future
Ever since we started our village in 2005 we wanted to run our own farm – as most rural Ugandan families still do. Farming is much more than just an economic activity to us. While its economic benefits are valuable, other benefits such as the educational- and health-benefits are equally important.
There’s a lot that farming can teach us. As we sow and grow the seeds and as we patiently nurture or water our crops, isn’t nature teaching us that the grass doesn’t grow faster when we pull it? Isn’t nature teaching us that we eat what we sow and that we are what we eat and that we can make a choice to take a personal responsibility for this?
Our children take a keen interest in our farm activities, too. The youngest particularly like our farm animals (we keep cows, chicken, goats, rabbits and bees) and others enjoy growing crops. Most of our children and families grow vegetables in their small house garden. Like many parents, our mothers have found this a gratifying way of teaching their children about responsibility to grow their own food and dealing with success but also failure when nature does its sometimes unpredictable work.