Olancho and Olanchito

One of my first activities after arriving to Honduras and getting the family settled was to review the work of two of the partner organizations along with the Food Security and Agriculture Technical Adviser at World Renew: Angela Boss. We traveled out to Olancho, where Katie and I had lived for two years, to visit the communities where Diaconia Nacional is working. It was great to be welcomed by a lot of familiar faces in the communities. I was also impressed by the work that Cesar is doing with the producers in that area. They had set up test plots where they are experimenting with different planting and fertilizing methods that can conserve moisture in this dry valley and greatly increase corn yields. The side-by-side comparisons showed clearly that the new practices were making a big difference.

Experimental Plot, Dos Quebradas

For me it was great to see Cesar having success in his role with Diaconia. Six years ago I got to know Cesar because he was involved in many of the youth activities that the Honduran Christian Reformed Churches were doing in the area. Even at that time it was clear that he had good potential for leadership. He is from Guacoca, one of the communities served by Diaconia in that valley. We visited Dos Quebradas, Los Charcos, and La Avispa.

Cesar, Ag Program Coordinator, Diaconia Nacional

Showing off the results of worm composting

 From there we drove back to Tegucigalpa, then took a ten hour car ride to Olanchito to visit the communities where Alfalit works. Carlos, Alfalit's coordinator, took us up into the mountains on some pretty rough roads. We saw lots of tilapia and snail production.

Tilapia and Snail Pond

We also met a farmer who uses velvet bean as a cover crop, which allows him to get good yields while buying less fertilizer while not burning the hillsides to prepare the land. Carlos is a busy man. He has 11 communities to support in a variety of programs including credit unions, plantain producer groups, conservation agriculture, agroforestry, honey production, and more.

Hillside cornfield that used velvet bean cover crop with no burning before planting

 Later, on back in our office I was compiling data from a community agriculture diagnostic and I did some conversions to compare Honduras' average corn yield to what I am used to seeing in Minnesota. The results were so surprising that I thought I had made a calculation error. The average yield of corn in Honduras is between 15 and 30 bushels per acre, the US average is around 180 according to the USDA. http://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?commodity=corn&graph=yield
Needless to say there is a lot of room for improvement. Maybe it is an unfair comparison to look at farming the flat prairies versus the rocky hillsides, but it is clear from the work being done here that a few small changes can make a big impact which can help a lot of people have a more stable food supply, and better incomes.

We're back!

By Katie

It's high time I get around to writing a blog post about this huge life change we've had. On June 30 we arrived in Honduras and started settling into our new home. Since we haven't done much about communication, I'll start at the very beginning. Matt accepted a job with World Renew (the new name of the organization that we went with before when we lived in Honduras). He's now a Program Consultant, which means he works with programs such as the agriculture program he was a part of before, and helps them design and carry out goals so as to stay on track with grants. We live in the city which is a pretty big change from the small town we lived in before. This time we have a kitchen sink and cupboards! It feels pretty swanky.

The kids and I are settling into new life here. We still haven't received our boxes that we shipped from home, so we're running a bare-bones operation around here. The kids get a little lost sometimes, so they look to me more often to guide them for what to do. We spend lots of time outside, but there's a lot that I have to do inside too.


I originally was thinking I might stay home and maybe even home school for the first year. I can only find 5-day options for preschool and I thought that was a little much. But, a few days into living here, we all decided that homeschooling was a bad idea and that five days of preschool sounds great! I hear from other moms that there are way fewer options for getting out such as moms Bible studies, library story times, fewer parks to visit, all of which help make five days of preschool make sense. I've applied for a job at a Pre-K-12 school where the kids could go to preschool and I'm scouting out other options too. Would you pray with me for discernment and opportunity in finding a good fit for our family? Thank you!

Matt's been gone all week out in various communities, some of which were ones that he worked with when we lived in the department of Olancho. Hopefully he'll have some pictures and stories to share when he gets back.

Hydraulic Ram Pump

In September I was able to take a leave of absence from work and spend a month working with Walter, the new agriculture and environment program coordinator. It felt very good to be back in Honduras! I got to see a lot of old friends, and the looks on peoples faces when I showed up on their doorsteps was priceless. I think many people thought they would never see me again.
Anyway, during this trip we tried out an interesting pump design that uses the flow of water to pump water up a hill.

It is called a hydraulic ram pump. The design I used is from Clemson University. http://www.clemson.edu/irrig/equip/ram.htm
So, thank you Clemson. I assume since you posted this design info on the internet that it was fair game for me to use.
I did update the design a bit (basically stripped it down of anything not totally necessary to make it cheaper and lighter). One was built and tested here in Minneapolis which I brought with me in an extra suitcase. We built another one in Honduras. The components turned out to be cheaper in Honduras which was a nice surprise. Who knows about the quality, only time will tell.

The basic concept of the pump is to capture a large flow of water going down a decline, convert some of it's momentum into pressure, and use this pressure to pump a smaller portion of the original water up hill to the destination.

Here is a video of it installed in a field of one of the promoters in the community of Nueva Palestina, Patuca.

Here is Omar and his little girl showing the resulting flow of water up the hill in the plot where the group is growing plantains.

I did make up a little training manual in Spanish much of which is just the Clemson material translated.




You can also access the document by clicking here.


I also need to Thank Engineer 775 on Youtube for the video ram pump lessons (1,2, and 3).
Some of the design changes are taken from him as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y_WWxWdn5A