Everything is green

EVERYTHING IS GREEN !
by Ken Mellish
Jan 20,2007

We are in Embu and every thing is green. The corn is tall with huge ears and the grass is lush. We see fat donkeys pulling carts and well fed cows grazing by the side of the road. People are roasting long ears of corn by the roadside.

We arrived in Kenya on Wednesday. The country side looks wonderful and there is such a contrast in the vegetation from the a year ago.

Last year it was very dry and the crops had failed. The corn and grass were stunted and brown. There was not enough food for people to eat in many areas. This time there has been rain falling since October and in many areas there were floods in December.

We met with the new Board and Management at the Embu Dairy Cooperative Society. They were elected only a month ago and are starting to develop a plan. They have many challenges to deal with. Ken Mellish and Shaad Olingo, our Kenyan Field Officer, plan to work with them to see how they can meet these challenges so they can continue to sell the milk for the 3000 families who produce milk from their cows. Farmers Helping Farmers started working with the Embu dairy last year. With CIDA assistance we were able to purchase three small milk cooling tanks. The tanks are located in the countryside and the farmers milk their cows and carry the milk to an assembly point where it is picked up. Pick up may be by either a small truck with milk cans or a bicycle equipped with plastic containers to transport up to 100 liters of milk. Having the coolers improves the marketing of milk by the farmers.

This morning we will meet with Stephen, the Agronomist and Faith, the Milk Quality Control Officer hired last year by Farmers Helping Farmers. During the afternoon we will go to see one of the milk coolers and visit a dairy farm.

We are staying at the Guest House at the KARI Research Centre. This house was built for visiting researchers and it has four bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. When we arrived yesterday evening we went out to the market to buy food. We also had to buy a new gas cooking plate for the kitchen- and Simon, our driver and Teresa Mellish had to visit three places to buy the cooker, the gas and the regulator. Ken, Shaad and Daniel Bondt went to the open air stalls to buy fruit and vegetables. The vendors have a good selection in their stalls which comes from the farming areas around Mount Kenya. We couldn’t find eggs yesterday, so Daniel went out this morning before breakfast to find eggs for breakfast.

We are getting oriented to the time change- we all had about 5 hours sleep last night. Still not enough sleep but an improvement over the first few nights here.