From Longmont to Botswana, Rotary clubs are banding together to bring a life-changing project to a small African village: a learning garden that will teach people how to cultivate crops.
Longmont Rotary member and wildlife photographer Andrew Lee is the project manager and driving force behind the garden, the idea for which arose on a trip Lee and his wife took to Botswana two years ago. The “learning” aspect of the garden is its role as a test site for raising crops – vital education for the village, which doesn’t grow any of its own food.
“We want to jumpstart the joy of seeing something sprout,” Lee said. “We’re looking at a growing garden that’s going to be there for a while.”
With roughly 400 residents, the remote village of Khwai, Botswana, is 70 miles away from the provincial capital of Maun and receives frequent visits from elephants and cape buffalo. The village relies on imported crops, but the new garden aims to change this by providing a space for local kids and their parents to develop their gardening skills.
The garden will sit next to the village’s preschool and will measure around 50 feet long by 80 feet wide, Lee said. Construction is already underway and should finish in September or October. Most recently, volunteers drilled a well for irrigation and are in the process of adding a solar-powered water purification system to the village.
“I’m a gardener, but I’ve never built a garden where I’ve had to have a borehole and a pump,” Lee said, referring to some of the project’s unique challenges. “So it was a learning experience, frankly.”
Lee is coordinating the garden project stateside with a committee from Longmont Rotary and support from the Twin Peaks and Boulder Rotary clubs, as well. Heading the project in Botswana is the Rotary Club of Gaborone (the country’s capital), a former Coloradan who lives in Maun and the Natural Selection Foundation, a local nonprofit.
“It was really serendipitous because we had all the components that make a successful project,” he said. “You don’t plan for that, you just hope for it. These pieces just came together and made it really compelling.”
Lee said villagers will plant zucchini, legumes and perennials in the garden once it’s complete. If the model proves to be a success, he hopes other plots will start appearing around the village.
Through a grant from Rotary International and a fundraising effort led by Lee, Longmont Rotary obtained the $14,000 needed to cover the project. Longmont Rotary president Wein-Pin Yeh said the club hasn’t taken on an international project in several years, so it was exciting to watch Lee’s idea come to fruition.
“Gardening here is so easy and common to us…but we often forget that’s not a given,” Yeh said. “Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a long partnership. There are a lot of things that can be done in Botswana.”
Lee already has his sights set on other charitable projects for the area, including giving every household in the village a Hippo Roller to make transporting water easier. He said he’d like to visit Khwai again when the garden is complete.
“I’m getting more out of this than we put in, and we put in a lot,” Lee said. “I didn’t expect that.”
