Driving through the Somali countryside, you can pick out giant mango trees along the road. In some communities, these mango trees might be 40 or 50 years old, with deep roots and plenty of shade. In some cases, they’ll grow to 90 feet high and 80 feet wide.
In Annayo, we saw many mango trees and would often find ourselves sitting under the oldest trees to meet and talk with people.
And many of these farms had an abundance of fruit trees — mango, papaya, lemon, orange, a lemon-orange hybrid we’d never before seen or tasted!
But to make an orchard thrive, the trees need to be pruned and cared for. If they aren’t, the weight of the fruit might cause a branch to break off or, in the worst case, for the tree to topple over and die.
To help the farmers deal with this problem, we bought all twenty farms loppers!
The loppers had long arms, so the farmers can reach even some of the tallest spots on many of their trees.
“With more tools, we will be able to have more people working on the land,” said farmer Abdullahi Qadan. “We will have a much greater capacity with more supplies.”
This change made possible by Mankind is My Business
