The St. Francis School for the Hearing Impaired in Kitale, Kenya has 45 students. In 2023, Thrive for Good helped them start their gardens, which now contain 320 garden beds!
The garden is not only providing all of the vegetables for the school, but is also generating income for them, and has inspired many people in the community to start their own gardens.
Video Transcript:
I’m Sister Magdaline Mwaniki from St. Francis School for Hearing Impaired. Before I came to learn about Thrive, we had many problems with sickness. We used to take learners to the hospital most of the time.
But the moment we learned about it and we had classes, we started with the learners, the gardens, whereby we started producing vegetables of different types, and we used to add as well as we used the medicinal plants that helped us reduce the hospital bill from 20,000 Kenya shillings (150 USD) to 3,700 Kenya shillings (28 USD) per month.
They were very happy enjoying the digging and preparing the land. We planted different types of vegetables. As the community were passing by, they would see the flowering plants. They came and asked questions on how we started. We told them we started by double digging, preparing the land well, whereby it was 5 by 20 feet. After that, they went and also started in their own farms.
We just get our food from our garden here. They don’t go for vegetables in the market. We just get it from our own shamba (garden). After learning about medicinal plants, we planted artemisia and rosemary. We used to prepare it for the learners or the children. After that, we continued using the organic vegetables, which are very natural, that have no toxins giving it to the body.
As a result, the sicknesses went down. There’s a very big difference between people using organic foods and those using the fertilizers that we were using before. You find that their bodies are healthy. They look more handsome or beautiful than they used to. So I would call each and every person to come in for organic farming. Thank you.
