Feeding Daylight

A guest post from David Maus, following his visit to Daylight last week:

If you've been following the 1-minute updates, or have been very involved with Daylight in the

past year, you know that acquiring land for the school has been an ongoing struggle. Because we

believe it's important for Daylight to have uninhibited use of classrooms and school facilities and to be able to house children who have been orphaned or who come from faraway nomadic tribes, we have remained committed to acquiring land even as various obstacles have arisen. For those of us not from Pokot, this process has emphasized some interesting legal and cultural differences.

So it was very gratifying for me last week to be able to visit the land that Daylight has already acquired. The visit to Pokot, my first, provided plenty of material for reflection, but I want to focus a little bit on one of the objectives that the new land will hopefully allow Daylight to achieve: food self-sufficiency.

Being food self-sufficient would be no mean feat for Daylight. The school already has 140 students, and will grow as dormitories allow more students from further afield to attend. Moreover, Daylight is situated in a region that often struggles with food security. But the new land just might make this ambitious goal plausible.

First of all, much of the land is currently cultivated maize (or corn, if you prefer). Much of this will remain and provide a staple starch for the school. And as you may have read in a previous post on this blog, Daylight now has a cow which will provide milk. Michael also has plans to have a vegetable garden at the school.

But while I was at the new land, I had the opportunity to plant a variety of trees, including several fruit trees. This was especially rewarding as Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangaari Maathi had passed away that week, so planting trees in Kenya seemed a fitting tribute to the women who did so much to advance the cause of the natural environment in Africa.

But more to the point, producing fruit at the school will help to insure that students are not only getting enough calories, but also vitamins and nutrients.

Of course, these trees won't produce fruit for several years, but the goal of becoming sustainable and food self-sufficient is a long-term and ongoing process. And just like those trees, Daylight is a young and growing organism that will be bearing fruit long after the efforts we all put in today.