Community activity

This week, we had the opportunity to participate into a community activity at Stepping Stones international (SSI) in Mochudi. Nothing to do with the alley in your backyard, SSI is a NGO that have for mission to unlock the potential of vulnerable youth ages 12-25 through holistic development, strengthening families and activating sustainable opportunities to become self-sufficient. They offers programmes combining life skills, leadership training, psychosocial support and community mobilisation to enable youth to heal the scars of their past and build brighter futures. If you ask yourself if I came up with this description, the answer is no. I quoted their website that you can visit to know more about them and even do a donation. Think about it, it is almost time to do your tax declaration in Canada, you can get tax return and do a good action.

So we were divided into several groups and I chose to be in the group of "The grannies". Punchline: they want advices on how to start a business. Their idea is to run a poultry farm in or close to a school to also educate kids. Interesting idea. They seem to be full of energy. They previously hosted a beauty contest to raise some funds to help a member of their community (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7yieT8ExCM).
So I personally spend some time on what is important to know to run a poultry farm. You will be glad to know that a chicken is giving approximately 240 eggs per years during the first years. The "production" is then going down and usually, the farmer decides of the retirement (understand slaughter) around 4 or 5 years old.
It was an interesting session where I clearly realized that the language barrier is a huge obstacle. Indeed, most of the grannies didn't speak English. My Setswana after 2 weeks is not that impressive so it didn't really help neither. For this reason, we had a translator. But despite his effort, it was really hard to achieve the goal of the session as they were giving a lot of feedback and had a lot of question and we didn't had enough time to address all of them. But it was a great experience. Unforgettable, a lesson of humility from these grannies who have still resources and energy to raise and educate kids to give them a future. It is simply amazing.