Letter from Lesotho:

Chris Skellenger, a local musician, gardener and humanitarian, is spending part of this winter in Lesotho, a small landlocked African nation surrounded entirely by South Africa. With his nonprofit organization, 11 Oaks, Skellenger promotes bucket drip irrigation in barren and dry Lesotho.

As Nadine Gilmer reported in her profile of Skellenger in the August 9, 2007 edition of the Glen Arbor Sun: “Bucket kits cost only about $7 each are able to irrigate a garden that receives little or no rain water. The bucket is filled twice a day from “gray water,” water that has already been used for washing or cooking. Hoses connected to the bottom of the bucket run through rows of plants, and each plant receives water from tiny openings in the hose that drip a drop at a time.

Skellenger writes:
“The Small Farm Resource Center (SFRC) at the Center for Poor and Less Privileged Children in Maseru came together smoothly. We have three types of bucket kits on display and have run about 3,000 feet of pipe to irrigate all other existing garden beds. We’ve cleaned the beds, amended the soil with their abundant supply of manure and planted every available spot with either seed or seedling. We’ve made manure tea and are set up to demonstrate crop rotation. We have a seedling propagation program ready to introduce about 1,000 plants every three weeks into the world.

11 Oaks has started forming its Team with the filling of two paid positions (a field extensionist and a community outreach specialist) and the creation of an intern program to get the older orphans involved in the process of growing food.
The St. Charles School project is coming along nicely, the main fields have been plowed and are in the process of being finished, graded for the irrigation system, which will run off of huge water collection tanks connected to eaves troughs. When it rains in Lesotho, it rains so hard that the giant drums fill right up. We also have two bucket kits set up to demonstrate the two most affordable forms of the kits.

We are analyzing the effectiveness of two different types of emitters. St. Charles is very remote and it is a real challenge to get parts up there in the quantities we need. The poor little VW Golf we’ve rented must be wondering what it has done to deserve this. But it perseveres!

One thing that quickly becomes apparent is the need to get the bucket kits into the villages. To this end, Mr. Mafisa, our community outreach specialist, has been setting up meetings with area churches and chiefs so we can spread the technology throughout the countryside.

He is quite an asset as he has been in social work and development for most of his life. He is 41. Our field extentionist, Anthony, is 28 and a schoolteacher. By the way, I am 52 but refuse to act like it, but you knew that.

We have demonstration plots at the Methodist Children’s Center in Semonkong and at Rachel’s Orphanage is Maputsoe. With many public meetings recently completed, the phone rings almost daily with a request from a church or orphanage for a demonstration kit that the local villagers might observe. We’re doing two more today (1600’!) with a Rotary meeting at night. We’ve met with government officials and are crafting a program of support and cooperation with them. We will keep the district officers of the Dept. of Agriculture and Food Security apprised of the locations of our demonstration areas so they can direct people there accordingly.

We’ve reduced the cost of the kits down to about $20 in materials (lets not even do the math on the overhead) — all available locally. 11 Oaks is working with local and international partners to subsidize the cost of the kit and get the price for a villager down to about $5 per family. That way, a kit will only cost about a week’s worth of wages and that may be the best starting point. The only instance where the kit is free is when it is used in a demonstration capacity and the curator of the plot is trained in all aspects of the process. Now that our shipment of pipe is finally in, we will pre-manufacture kits so they are ready to go when requested and will leave small caches of kits with the administrators of the demonstration kits. The money received will go back into the purchase of more kits, etc.

Although this is technically ‘Africa’ it looks much more like North Dakota or parts of Wyoming, visually. It’s hot, dry, and barren and the rain that does come has the tendency to arrive in buckets. The lightning storms are frequent and spectacular but rarely result in usable precipitation.
There are no non-domesticated animals, very few birds, and the air in the villages and urban centers is a fragrant mix of burning garbage, manure and diesel fumes. There are few trees and those are mostly introduced poplars and eucalyptus. The roads are typical third world: if the potholes and rocks don’t get ya, the taxi drivers will. Public transportation is everywhere, because whenever someone loses their job they buy an old junker and become a ‘taxi driver’. There are no fences, so herders with flocks of sheep, cows, donkeys, and the occasional goat, are a constant roadside companion. Donkeys and wheelbarrows are the beasts of burden. Basotho ponies roam free also.

When traveling one must factor in how much time will be spent in police roadblocks. I was in seven of them just yesterday. Or what are the possibilities that a flash flood will make a bridge impassable and leave you sleeping in your car. I have pictures of that flood from our trip to Semonkong — whoa!
Even though English is the language of education, I would be totally useless without my interpreters. All details or important information is relayed in Sesotho. People write English quite well but speak it poorly. They would never speak English to each other, so practice does not make perfect.

That is probably enough for now. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is roll in the snow and thank God I live in Leelanau County.”