When she was touring East Africa with the Friendly Folk Dancers, Elizabeth Cave of Ealing Meeting saw at first hand the terrible problems confronting Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide and she was moved to do what she could about it. Her Growing Together project, under the auspices of the African Great Lakes Initiative, began a year later. Elizabeth spent last February volunteering in Rwanda and she is there again for the whole of October.

The obvious problem is to somehow heal the rift between convicted killers and the families of their victims, living once again as neighbours, but there are other more practical problems that also need to be solved. That region of East Africa has no tradition of soil conservation or of composting. Rubbish, whether organic or toxic, is thrown into a pit, burned, buried and forgotten. The modern age has added highly toxic things like batteries to the mix. Elizabeth has been keeping an allotment for years and is well used to that scale of very domestic agriculture.

One good technique is the sack garden, basically a sack full of nutritious soil and compost, safe from pollution and with a growing area four times its footprint on the ground. This is one of the methods she has been sharing with the Rwandans and now she has shared it with the young people of Hammersmith Quaker Meeting.

Hammersmith Quakers are fortunate to have a large group of enthusiastic and cooperative young people and a dozen of them set to the task last month, ranging in age from sixteen-year-old Melanie to six-year-old Tom.

The first thing we needed was a sack and the best one we found had held 25kg of onions (Friends at Meeting took most of the onions and onion soup was to be served for lunch at the next Area Meeting for Business). Despite our urban location we have a pleasant mature garden with good soil and we have a compost heap in the corner. The flowerbed outside the children’s room is a part of the garden that does not get much attention so that was where the sack was to go.

Getting topsoil from the flower bed.

Andy was worried that we might be damaging the ivy when we were digging out the back of the flower bed but the ivy could do with a bit of damage. When we moved the top off the compost heap it was wriggling away with a good population of worms, yucky for some of the diggers but just the right mix to get the soil going.

The compost bin.

There is an extra bit of technology. A column of stones goes up the middle to provide irrigation and drainage, and the way to get it there is to cut off the top and bottom of a squash bottle to make a tube, and as the soil rises you fill the tube with stones and draw it up.
When the sack is full, hammer in a couple of stakes to keep it upright and then comes the planting! Cut slits in the sack and push in seedlings. We put leeks in the side and spinach beet in the top.

Planting the beet and leets.

September is not the ideal time for planting but we will see how it goes. We will send an update when we harvest. Meanwhile if you want to see a practical reconstruction of sustainable third-world small-scale agriculture, come to Hammersmith Quaker Meeting.

Watering the finished garden.

If you want to keep in touch with how it works in Rwanda follow Elizabeth’s blog at http://growingtogetherinrwanda.blogspot.com/.

Elizabeth has also written an article on her leadings into her work in Rwanda, which is published in the next issue of Friends Quarterly, out in a couple of weeks.