August 26, 2014
Simon, the grandfather of Sakhiwe Songhe who helped us build the digester at Sundowner’s Backpackers Lodge, lives on a farm in Swaziland outside Manzini where he has fruit orchards and keeps cattle, geese, and chickens. It is here that Sakhiwe and Bonkhe are conducting this year’s follow up to their hydroponics experiments. They are proving to farming communities that you can achieve at least twice the yield on Swaziland’s poor land using compost to build soil. Solar CITIES went to the farm the weekend of August 23 and 24. With the family and international volunteers, we built a Solar CITIES IBC/ARTI hybrid biogas system to provide cooking gas for Simon and fertilizer for Sakhiwe and Bonkhe’s science-in-action experiments as they go into their senior year of high school.
