Hwange, 26 June, 2023 / 2:29 pm (ACI Africa).
The gardening initiative at St. Mark’s Nagangala Catholic Mission of Zimbabwe’s Hwange Diocese is facilitating pastoral activities, the Parish Priest has said in a Monday, June 19 report.
“We are in rural communities where it is difficult to get money. The best thing was to start working towards getting food and other necessities,” Fr. Brilie Tshuma is quoted as saying.
Fr. Tshuma explains that after identifying the need of vegetables in the locality, and being aware of the call for care of the environment presented in the May 2015 Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis “on care for our common home”, Laudato Si’, the gardening project was undertaken in September 2022.
“When I came here, this place was bare, with no grass growing. The land itself was not favorable for gardening”, he says, adding that he took advantage of the underground water source and the water storage tank that his predecessor, Fr. Kolwani Nyoni, had facilitated in August 2019.
In the June 19 report, Fr. Nyoni is quoted as saying, “The first thing we needed to do was to drill a borehole to have access to water. We were happy that we found water.”