A little background
One of our favourite activities at Luminosity is sponsoring a Community-based organisation called The Sunbeam Project in a mountainous region of Uganda; we send a donation to Sunbeam for every single holiday that we sell. So in fact, our clients are knowingly, or unknowingly contributing to elevating the lives of children and adults alike!
Sunbeam does all sorts of things, like :
- running a school for disadvantaged children in the district
- growing vegetables
- training village women in making and selling handicrafts
- operating a small tea plantation
- growing and selling mushrooms
When a bright idea is realised
Here is a picture of our dear friend, the Director of the Sunbeam Project, Mr Tugumisireze Frances proudly displaying the result of a successful harvest.
The process consists of a number of steps:
– build a shed with no windows
– obtain a growing medium (called substrate) and a supply of spores/spawns
– sterilise the substrate and drain it
– pack the substrate and spores into plastic bags
– hang the bags in your nice warm, dark shed
– find a willing child from the village to water the crop every day
– wait
– harvest
Then when all goes well, the crop can be eaten, or better still, sold to local hotels and markets at quite a nice profit
It is quite fun, especially when the children get involved, preparing the substrate (we usually use bean straw) and packing the bags. It is also educational and gives the children a practical biology lesson and an introduction to commercial farming. This is a very valuable step up from the traditional subsistence farming traditionally practiced by their parents.
A downside of living in the mountains is that it is a long journey to the nearest market town and a wastage rate of nearly 40% was being realised on some harvests because of the delay in getting the produce to market. This was overcome by the introduction of drying racks and a grinder to produce mushroom powder, which can be sold at leisure.
When things go wrong...
Frances is a great innovator and always looking for new ideas, so you can imagine his excitement when he discovered, through the magic of Google, that he could sterilize the substrate with steam, rather than boiling it.
So he set to work with great zeal and build his very own steamer, as per the Google photo. Unfortunately his steamer turned out to be a smoker! Result: vast quantities of contaminated substrate, at a considerable loss.
Whilst we are rather distraught at the financial impact, people in Uganda always know how to laugh!
Better luck next time Frances!
If you would like to know more about The Sunbeam Project, the neighbouring mountain gorillas or safaris across Africa, give our office a call on 1300 221 550
