Key People: Melvin Chiombe, Oscar Mwelwa, Jospeh Okello
We met with Melvin, Oscar and Joseph at the Fig tree Café before visiting the OM base and walking around the Foundations for Farming demo plot with Moses and Brian Zimba.
We discussed the need for OM to provide reports from the mission field, as they are receiving them every few months from Gambia, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana, Senegal and Niger, although we understand most of these will not be able to be put up on the website.
They are still training many missionaries, and the work towards sustainability still continues. They have started to produce some initiatives to help raise their own funds, but this is still a struggle.
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Moses Chongo has been working in the garden and attended the Foundations for Farming training in June last year. He has been able to produce vegetables and green maize that he takes to the OM kitchen. They then sign for it at an agreed value, and those funds are credited to the OM demo garden to show sustainability. It seems that process of recording is having some teething issues, so once they get the process sorted, we will be able to report.
There have been some struggles to get continued supplies of seeds and seedlings needed to ensure constant harvest and income generation, but they are working on that programme.
The OM missionary students under the “reach programme” come to help out in the garden in their allotted timetable slot. They provide both some extra labour but more importantly have the time to be taught the practical elements of Foundations for Farming to back up the theory that Brian Zimba has been teaching.
The flat that Bright Hope World funded in 2010 still continues to create revenue for OM and helps to provide funds for the Makati School.
A new proposal to build more flats in the Maia plot in Kabwe has been presented that gives an annual return of around 12%. Given the history of the flats this may be a viable option, but we are still working through the numbers to assess if this can be used to reduce our current funding of missionaries.
We continue to discuss and ask for any proposals from missionaries as to self-income generation. The one funding that we did for a missionary in Chad of a fence and gardening is still helping fund the ministry and produce food for the community.
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Brian runs the Reach programme at OM. The aim is to empower the missionaries in any way to reach the lost.
He attended GLO in 2010 and was trained in Foundations for Farming by us in that year when we taught GLO students for a week. After finishing at GLO he started his own garden in Ndola at his church in Mushili and encouraged the people from the community to come and see the garden. They would come and he would be able to evangelise them. 12 other people from the church were helping in this ministry.
He then spent seven years at Dawn Trust, a German NGO that focusses on teaching farming. They had seen his passion at the local church so gave him an opportunity to be at Dawn.
He has been with OM for the last few months and has been given the role to oversee the training of the students in the farming area. Moses now reports to Brian, and they are working together to make the garden be self-sustaining and be used as a demonstration farm.
The budget is to remain the same for now. It is great to see the OM management continue to think about sustainability.