June was another busy and exciting month here on Mfangano. The weather has been great with only a few light showers and the lake remaining calm and peaceful, we have been making the most of our brief downtime between guests to do some maintenance and upgrades. We have extended our Jetty by 20ft in preparation for the dry season and the expected drop in the level of the lake. One of our boats ‘Balakwasi’ has been completely stripped down to the keel and being rebuilt. Our guests have enjoyed watching and learning about the age old techniques from one of the best boat builders in the area.

We commissioned a local artist to make sign posts around the camp, he has proven very talented and we now have some of his paintings and carvings on display in our camp shop.

The garden continues to improve and flourish with some great beetroot, onion and potato harvests. We now produce 90% of all our greens and most of herbs with other vegetables being turned into lovely pickles. These complement our meals and are available in the camp shop along with delicious chilli sauce, moringa powder and pure honey harvested from our new beehive.

We have also begun a small fish farming and aquaponics experiment which is doing very well, currently there are 300 tilapia fingerlings ranging from ½” to 6” we expect our first harvest of plate sized Tilapia at the end of next month. The idea behind the garden and fish farm is to promote abundance and sustainability at low cost, if we can prove that this is possible without pesticides, large areas of land or expensive equipment then hopefully these principles will spread throughout the island. The members of staff have already shown huge interest and some are starting small kitchen gardens/sack planting and composting areas at home. The fish are fed on cheap readily available meal and all filtration/aeration is done manually, on an Island of fisherman being able to sustainably provide 50kgs of fish per month outside your doorstep would have a massive impact.

This month has been all about trees, we have planted over fifty seedlings including Guava, PawPaw, Lime, Avocado, Mango, Moringa as well as various indigenous hardwoods.

We have some fantastic special offers on at the moment with incredible resident rates and NGO packages; please take a moment to visit our website for more information www.mfanganoislandcamp.com

Karibu Sana from all of us here!

Miles Mcdonald, Mfangano Island Camp Manager.