Go team.

We organized a meeting with a group of community women yesterday, and the discussion flowed so well it was almost too easy. We introduced the project, they talked about it for a while, and then divided themselves into two teams and wanted to know when they could start.

I was not expecting that at all. We were prepared to survey a population of people, ask them some baseline questions, and start to formulate an idea of how this could get off the ground. But then, here it was, already being launched and it didn't take that much time or energy. The energy is already there, I guess we just tapped into it in the right way.

So now we have two teams of women, both of which have experience running community gardens, and they have asked to take control of and test our pilot prototypes. I'm getting all the materials together this weekend, and we will start setting them up on Monday!

Community Input

VertiGrow still hasn't arrived in Nairobi, but that didn't stop us from starting our research! I spent a few hours at the clinic with Faith, asking people a range questions including what they eat on a daily basis, what they wish they could eat, how much money they spend on food, how much money they make selling food they grow (with the sack garden project), and then asking some more open ended questions based on our VertiGrow model (what do they think of it, what materials do they have access to that could be used to build it, what could make it better, what makes it good?)

Our research is by no means complete, but definitely a good jumping off point! We had a variety of responses which will lead VertiGrow in new and exciting directions, and many which confirmed what our impressions were going in, namely that people do not eat much, or have much money to spend on food. It's pretty cool that almost all people reported eating vegetables on a daily basis, which means we can focus more on access to growing, rather than trying to raise awareness on nutritional needs. We also followed the pediatric patients into the weighing station to link household data on nutrition, farming, and VertiGrow to the height/age data of a child in the house.

~Ellie