VI-skogen

After our visit to Lake Victoria and a quick lunch, a small group of students got into one of the school buses and were driven to the headquarters of the VI-forest project in Kisumu. This building is the base of the organization, which in Kisumu helps around 40 000 farmers to improve their farms, the nature and their lives. We got a short briefing about their work, got in the bus again and drove for an hour to a small farm owned by a man and his wife.

He showed us what changes he had made to his farm to improve it, told us what he had gained from it and showed his fields of bananas, beans and a couple of Kenyan crops which I don’t know the names of. It was the first time I’ve seen such an organized farm here in Kenya.

One problem for me though was once again seeing the Kenyan way of keeping animals. Just as every farmer here in Kenya this one had a couple of cows, goats, chickens and dogs to be able to provide his family with food. But they don’t have the same way of looking at animals here as they do in Sweden, which is understandable, but still it was quite hard for us to see the tiny dog shed, the over crowded chicken house some of the cows which in my eyes looked a bit thin. But even that is improving thanks to the VI-forest project now that they are teaching the farmers to better keep animals and bread them in a more humane way.