They say, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. We are looking for funding for a project that will put this Chinese proverb in perspective! We’re calling it the “Passion Fruit Project”. It will be considered part of our children’s education program, because it will teach life skills that can help provide them with a living and food for a lifetime. Each passion fruit seedling will cost us just 800 Ugandan shillings ($0.22 US dollars).
Why passion fruit, you may ask…
The profit that can be made by selling passion fruit makes it well worth the investment. Our project total will be $350. It takes 3 months for the passion fruit plants to yield fruit. In just one month of harvesting fruit, we will make our investment back and be able to begin investing it into the children! Many of our children with special educational needs are not able to progress very far through the Ugandan curriculum as there is need to pass each year before moving forward. We are in the process of setting up a vocational education program to teach the children life skills and trades to provide opportunity for their future. This will include farming, animal husbandry, tailoring and crafts. These projects will also be part of the vital movement towards self sufficiency for the orphanage. We are now raising funds to start this passion fruit project as well as a chicken project that will be part of the children’s learning, provide food and bring in some income.
How far will the money go? Any amount (seriously, ever penny) can really make a huge difference to our passion fruit project and it will bring both us and you joy to see how many it will end up providing for! If one uses approved purple passion fruit, they will harvest five tons per season or year. Yellow passion fruit, on the other hand, yield an amount of nine tons per acre/per year.
Last year, God answered our prayers and one of our donors managed to get a second job that provided her with the funds to buy two acres of land for this organization. We now have a couple of plans to make sure that our children and the entire community can benefit from this gift. We will be using this property for both the passion fruit and chicken project. Already we have installed toilets and made it a more humane place to work on these projects. Our dreams don’t stop there, but it’s a place to start! So, if you have even a few cents to donate towards the cause, we would love for you to be part of making this project happen! The time is now. Planting season is at hand!
“Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.” Luke 12:33
