George Watson's College, Edinburgh

Zomba TREEZ has been sponsoring the Happy Hammers football team, the Berries FC football team, the Hammers' Sisters and the Berries Sister's netball teams but the one thing that they have all been asking for, is a new kit. And George Watson's College delivered!

A group of college students and teachers have been coming out to Malawi for a couple of years and we were lucky enough to meet them at the right time. They have been incredibly supportive of Zomba TREEZ with annual donations to the project, as well as the organisation of their own team of runners for the Run4Reforestation, and now a very kind donation of kits and balls for our teams here :)

DAPP kindly donated sports shoes to the netball teams a few weeks ago (as part of their donation to the R4R) so the ladies are now really look the part.

I am on now on a quest for used sports bras - so please give me a shout if you have any (WhatsApp: +265 997 331709) and we can make a plan as to how we can get them :)

We have also been experimenting...

At some point in the past ( I am not sure how far back it was), I visited a water conservation project in Machinga.

The communities there have built stone bunds along the contours of the hillside to slow the water down. They have also dug trenches of different sizes along the contour lines in their fields to both slow water down and allow the water to be absorbed more slowly permitting the villagers to cultivate their land for longer.

So we wanted to see if we could demonstrate how it was done here.

We chose this field as it runs along a road which many people use. The farmer asked us for seed and in exchange, I asked him if he would be interested in having a demonstration plot, and he agreed :)

Half his plot has been cultivated normally and half has trenches running along it at 10m intervals.

In plots with slopes less steep the trenches can be made at 20m intervals.

The idea is that people will notice the difference in the productivitiy of his plot and want to emulate it :)

Fingers crossed!