If you want to go far, go together - Part IV
Andrea, Patrick, and Dara are ETH students who participated in a two-week field project to Bungoma County, Western Kenya from Nov. 10 to 25, 2018. In this post, they talk about learning from each other.
Read more about the class in the first post of this series.
Learning from people of different ages, cultures and backgrounds (by Andrea Steinegger)
A large discussion group gathered on a farm in Kamukuywa.
On the third day of our field trip in Kamukuywa, my group did an extensive research on a big farm. The more time we spent there, the more people, adults as well as children, were gathering around us. We were accompanied by much laughter of the children over our ‘silly’ soil inspection: Kneading soil, dirtying our hands and looking very serious while doing so. The adults were very interested in our work and kept asking many questions. Luckily, we were not alone to face all these questions. One of the Kenyan soil professors was there for support. The whole crowd ended up asking, discussing, answering, laughing and explaining. The entire field trip was a great experience to learn from so many different people – professors, locals, farmers, women and men, old and young as well as Kenyan, Belgian and Swiss students – to be able to see things from so many different angles.
Discussing zero-grazing with a Kenyan farmer (by Patrick Müller)
A Kenyan farmer and ETH student Patrick Müller discuss the zero-grazing system to improve milk production in Kenya. Zero-grazing is a form of dairy production where livestock is fed entirely with collected forage (i.e. animals are kept in stables and are not in contact with pasture).
During our field trip in Kenya, I had an interesting discussion with a local farmer about the zero-grazing system. The farmer explained how he was able to improve milk production by increasing the fodder intake with adding molasse as a byproduct from the sugarcane production and adding feed supplement bought at the market. The cow he keeps is a crossbreed between a robust African breed, adapted to the African conditions, and the dairy-purpose breed Holstein. With this strategy, the farmer is able to reach a milk production of 20 liters a day and sell the additional milk, which is not consumed by the household, at the market to get additional income. Compared to the production average of this particular region, the farmer’s production is very high and the grazing at the communal grassland is reduced.
Different life circumstances, but mutual interests (by Dara Colijn)
The road we walked up and down every day for our fieldwork.
I had been to Africa before so I was not shocked when I arrived in the small village of Mabanga for our field course. I was aware that the livelihoods of the villagers are extremely different to my life in Switzerland. However, one memory of the field trip that will remain with me was on our last day as we were walking through “our” village one last time. We were on the way to the home of the village elder, Pius, who had helped us navigate in the village and had introduced us to many locals. I was walking next to one of my fellow group mates from Kenya and a young boy from the village, who was currently writing his high school exams. He was telling us which subjects he liked and disliked at school and which Swiss football stars he was a fan of and we found things we had in common. The conversation for me really captured the essence of our week in the field. The people were extremely welcoming and genuinely heart-warming to talk to. No matter the huge difference between our lives, there was a mutual interest and we after all had some things in common we could easily bond over and laugh about.
We are grateful for the financial support by the WFSC (Course Support Grant for WFSC members) to the field projects in 2018 (Kenya) and 2017 (Ethiopia).