Day 3: Our Second Day in Londuimbali: The Composting 101 Class

Yesterday, a lot of excitement had been generated over the idea of composting. CNFA believed in it, the Cooperative Extension agent said that he believed in it and one of the cooperative leaders had heard that it was beneficial and was being used extensively on a farm on the way to Luanda. I had brought my computer from Rutherford County NC and, worked through Wednesday evening in Huambo assisted by images from the Internet, composing a PowerPoint presentation that would show the basics of the what, when, how and why of composting. In the morning, I had the translator, Arnaldo, put the verbiage into understandable Angolan style Portuguese. We took CNFA's LCD projector and headed once again for Londuimbali

To my surprise, we were met at Town Hall by even more farmers than had gone to the land with us the day before. Although the membership is officially composed of 22 women and 19 men, the audience decidedly male.

26 people were waiting for us. But as we set up, we realized that there were several problems. Lacking transport, the generator from the Cooperative Extension office has not been relocated to Town Hall. It was a big diesel electrical generator and it took 6 or 8 men to lift it into the CNFA's Ford pick-up. Then there was not enough extension cord and the multi-outlet surge protector was faulty. We patiently worked through all these issues wile Luciano handed out paper and pens to the participants so that they could take notes.

We spoke for a couple of hours about why we use compost, the differences between composto organicos and cemicas and how composto is made. We focused on the 5 main ingedientes of compost: air, water, heat, brown matter and green matter. The PowerPoint and Arnoldo described them in detail. We taught of the types of piles and the sizes of the pile, and where the compostiera should be placed, emphasizing that composting was a natural process and that the most important aspects were to layer the materials and to keep the material as moist as a wrung-out sponge. We decided that we would build a compost pile as a group and where we were going to build it. Luciano and Arnaldo excellently guided the discussion to the issues of working together, deviding the tasks by group and locating and collecting the materials needed to make compost.. After some discussion, we decide to break in to three groups: Green, Brown and Manure. Pictured is the "Brown" Group. They agreed to collect from around the village high carbon materials like dried grass, leaves, paper. cardboard, etc.

The nine member Green Group would bring high nitrogen materials: orange and mango peels, kitchen scraps, green weeds and grass. Since manure can be either brown or green depending on how fresh it is, it was decided that a separate group of eight would bring chicken, goat, cow, ox, horse and donkey manure and they were the Grupo Estrume, the Manure Group.

The members of each group would collect the appropriate materials packed in a used 50kg fertilizer sack. (50 kg sacks are a universal measurement in the countryside of Angola) We agreed that we would reconvene on Tuesday, bring our bags and build a compost pile near a shaded site close to a stream.

The entire group became animated as the plan came together except for the youngest member of the group who was peacefully asleep through the entire meeting.

After the class, Luciano, Domingo and the Cooperative Extension staff distributed bread with butter and the very popular carbonated pineapple drink, Blue. There were some really noble faces in the membership that I wanted to remember and, once I got started taking photographs, everyone wanted to pose.