The Kachele Land

Thanks to private donors, Kachele Primary School already has a home for its foundations. Below you can read an update written by one of our 1st session 2007 Summer trip volunteers. Trip participants also planted a living fence around the land perimiter.

Kachele – Gardens for a New School
July 2007

A plot of land, 1.7 hectares in size, awaits the trampling of 420 feet. Once the Kachele Primary School is built, 210 students will fill its seven grades. But while the planning for the school has started and the buildings will follow, the land itself has already been put to productive use.

As part of their school, students at Kachele will learn how to garden, so in laying out the site, space was set aside for the gardens and orchards. Already the garden plots are filled with the winter crops: Chinese cabbage, onions, rape, tomatoes, cabbage, maize, green peppers, an okra. The new trees planted, bananas, mangos, avocados, papaya, and lemons, will soon begin to bear fruit.

KCF Board Member Shea Van Rhoads and Kondwa Day Center Administrator Angela Malik visit the site of the future Kachele Primary School. Summer 2007.

The process establishing the new gardens has also been important. While the Kondwa Day Centre for Orphans arranged for a tractor to roughly plow the fields and hired a caretaker, Hameja, to watch over the land; much of the garden work has been done by the orphans’ guardians and caregivers. With the assistance of Hameja, the guardians have been shoveling, hoeing, planting, weeding, watering – all hard work done under the hot African sun.

When harvest time comes, the produce is gathered to provide vegetables and greens for Kondwa, and the excess, especially tomatoes, is sold in the local markets to benefit the school and the garden.

It soon will be time for spring planting in Africa, and whether it will be the new school called Kachele, or more gardens, the little plot of land in Zambia will bear fruit.