Another week with a lot of focus from a personnel standpoint on the upcoming TRAINING. But, as today's picture infers, our funds DID reach the Zambia bank account this week and our September feeding program has begun.
The picture this week is from another brand-new church partner in rural Chipata. Pastor Ephraim Phiri leads this small community, and S2S provided them enough bags of shelled maize at harvest that they will be able to distribute to 36 families MONTHLY until the next harvest. This is being done now in 124 churches all over Zambia every month.
The details of our training and input season ahead are coming together weekly now. In FOUR weeks, we hope to have 10,000 small grower names to deliver to the Zambian Minister of Agriculture. These names will represent growers from SEVEN different geographical areas where we have both a presence and at least one trainer. I believe I have created the Google Sheets template that will be used to create FIFTEEN files to accumulate those names. The FIFTEEN files represent the number of trainers that first spent the last growing season learning from Tracy and will now spend much of this coming growing season passing what they learned along to these 10,000 growers.
We actually do have just a few names in one file, but it is too small to report. Over the next FOUR weeks I hope to be reporting to you all an ever-increasing number of growers we have registered for this program. Many of you know how much I enjoy numbers, so I am hopeful this will be a very fun task to report to our readers weekly.
We don't have all the costs of the training nailed down at the moment, but if all goes as planned, we will be hoping to provide seed corn to many of these small growers at about $25 per grower by the first of December. As of today, we have around $15,000 raised towards that project. That amount would provide for our 600 most vulnerable families. I will be reporting as that number grows as well, but even at that level, we are close to 100 per region, which is a great start!
As always, we are SO thankful for all who are catching a glimpse of the EFFICIENCY of this effort and have partnered with us as we partner with our brothers and sisters in Zambia. THANK YOU!!
