Projects
Chicken Farming Project
This is a long term project which, when complete, will be raising 2,000 chickens per year and will have the potential to cover half of the annual expenses for 500 children in the primary school orphanage!
Chickens and eggs can either be sold or eaten, and those who participate in helping with this project are learning numerous trades from building chicken houses to raising chickens.
The chicken waste is used as fertilizer for crops.
Virtual Adoptions
The orphanage that we work with in Uganda has roughly 500 children in primary school and 75 children in secondary school. In a few years, we will have children entering university too!
We have started a program in which you can virtually adopt (sponsor) a child through a monthly donation. When you sponsor a child you will receive at least one picture and letter from the child annually. You can also write back through Lightforce One and have a pen-pal relationship with them.
The primary school school children can be educated by volunteers, but the secondary school children need to be sent to public or private school for their education, for which tuition needs to be paid (it’s not free). So, the cost to sponsor a child in primary school is $20 per month vs $30 per month for a child in secondary school.
Brick Making Project
After we dug the well, there was water to start making bricks. We made a batch of 50,000 bricks using the traditional local method, which included using wood molds for mud, drying them out in the sun, then putting them in a big hollow pile to and burning wood inside to harden. The bricks were ununiformed in shape, requiring lots of mortar, they don’t look good in the walls, and they’re not s strong and don’t last as long as we’d like them to.
There is a more modern method using a machine that was invented during one of the world wars. It combines a little bit of cement with the dirt and uses a press to squeeze out the water and compress a perfectly formed interlocking brick, requiring less mortar and making much better walls.
As with other projects, this one has multiple benefits. We can use the bricks for construction, sell them for revenue, and project participants are learning trades!
This was going to be a stand-alone project, but since we are building so many chicken houses for the chicken project, we are including it in the chicken project as it will cut down on construction costs and give us better chicken houses.
Well and Irrigation System
This is the project that started it all!
After spending many hours talking with the founder of both an orphanage and primary school with 500 children, and a women’s empowerment group with 200 women in Uganda about what their needs were, funding a well and irrigation system so they could grow more food seamed like the obvious choice.
After vetting out the person and the operations, Dave Bauer, the founder of Lightforce One, sent money to get started on the well, and the rest is history.