Last week we enjoyed hosting Dr. Grace Miller and some of her students from Indiana Wesleyan University taking a Sustainable Tropical Agriculture course. While they were here we asked some of the kids from our village if they would like to come and learn how to graft trees. It was neat to see their interest and how quickly they grasped the grafting techniques.
We also pulled out another frame of honey from one of our beehives and gave out samples to everyone there. The comb was more than an inch thick and dripping with delicious honey.
It is so neat to see kids get excited about projects like these ones. You can see the light come on in their heads as they realize what a difference such projects can make to their lives.
Simple things like this can help people get out of poverty. Grafting is a very simple procedure to learn and it's what makes trees consistently produce good fruit, yet almost no one in our area has grafted fruit trees. Beehives are a project that require little start-up cost compared to the revenue it can produce for a family, yet they are very rare in our region. We are excited to be teaching young people about these agricultural opportunities, as they are often the ones willing to try something new. This is just a small step forward in offering our neighbors better agricultural technology and techniques.
