UMCOR at Kibula

We're in the village of Kibula, a railroad station community about 75 kilometers from Kamina. It has three cell towers and electricity. UMCOR has been here. There's a well with a pump that is always busy. Children carrying water in all kinds of containers.

I happen to be sleeping in the small brick building (with a metal roof) that houses an UMCOR soy milk project. It is the coolest thing! The machine that turns the soybeans into mash is pedal-powered. The boiler looks a lot like a still. Wonder how much conversion would be required for processing corn mash?

The well is immediately paying off. The soy milk machine may take a little community development to get to being a game changer.

The complaint we hear, though, (at Mulongo, for instance) is that such projects only come to villages like Kibula, easily accessible. There are hundreds of villages not that far from here that will never see an UMCOR project. I'm not saying that UMCOR should or could provide projects like these for every village. They can't and they shouldn't.

What we're trying to lift up is that we do have people in every village around here. They are called United Methodist pastors. We're trying to get this kind of technology into their hands, so that they can drill wells and provide creative nutrition solutions in every village in Katanga.

Just one of the things that I see riding a bicycle.

Bob
Kibula