Claire Namutebi's work at home in Uganda is based among peasant farmers who grow coffee and bananas on small patches of land. A founder member of the Ugandan Organic Farmers' Association Network which promotes sustainable agriculture, she arrived in Co Leitrim this week for a four-month study visit to the Organic Centre in Rossinver.
Temperatures in Uganda range from 15 to 35 degrees C,l so it's no surprise that even indoors she resorted to wearing a woolly hat and layers of woolly jumpers to try to acclimatise to winter in Leitrim.
She runs a four-acre nursery and training farm in the Mukono district, close to Kampala city. One of her main aims in coming to the Organic Centre is to learn about the planning and running of training programmes. The Rossinver centre now offers a full-time year-long course in organic farming in addition to shorter courses.
Uganda may be known as the market garden of Africa but surviving on the land is a struggle. "About 80 per cent of our people are peasant farmers," she says. These farmers were encouraged to grow coffee beans but now that international prices have slumped, their income has been drastically reduced. Often people cannot even afford to send their children to school, she says.
One principle of sustainable farming which she tries to impress on farmers is diversification, to use their land to grow more than one crop. "If you don't get cash in hand, then at least you have something to eat," she says.
A basic problem in Uganda is that although valuable crops are grown, no processing of any significant scale is carried out. As Irish food producers know, value-added products make money, not the raw material.
All the coffee beans grown in Uganda are exported, and the irony is that many Ugandans end up buying over-priced, poor-quality instant coffee for their daily use, produced by the very multinationals which buy their beans at knock-down prices.
Claire also gives the example of passion fruit which is grown locally, yet there are no processing facilities to produce juice.
Various non-government organisations (NGOs) are working with farmers to try to encourage sustainable methods and Claire often provides the training. Among a pile of photographs showing the plants and trees she cultivates is one of her teaching a group of women how to make milk from soy beans.
Deforestation is another problem the organic farmers' network is trying to tackle. Most areas don't have electricity so people have to cut down trees for firewood. Claire encourages people to replace trees by planting fast-growing varieties which are also effective in replacing nitrogen lost from the soil.
She is also trying to promote the use of a particular type of stove, called a Lorena stove, which requires only about a fifth of the firewood normally used. These stoves only cost about £25 but that is a lot more than most Ugandans can afford. She says in addition to saving firewood the stoves would also make life a good deal easier for Ugandan women, who do all the back-breaking work of chopping and carrying wood, often from a radius of some miles.
Claire's trip to the Organic Centre was arranged by the head gardener, Klaus Laitenberger, who met her when she was on a short training course in England in 1998.
Among the methods she teaches is the use of ash, soap and paraffin rather than chemicals to control pests. Instead of artificial fertilisers, she encourages farmers to use animal manure or the leaves of plants.
Some of the advice she passes on, however, she got from her grandmother, who she remembers forbidding her uncle from putting DDT on their banana plantation at a time when its use was being encouraged. "She said the plantation had fed the family for generations and she would not allow him to put chemicals on it."
Claire will be spending four months at the Organic Centre and fund-raising is continuing to help pay for her trip. A number of events, such as raffles, have been organised.
The centre is also hoping to raise some extra money for Claire to bring back with her to buy the £25 stoves for poor families. Klaus points out that a £25 donation would also pay for the planting of 100 fast-growing trees.
Claire often has to provide training free of charge. Farmers cannot get even very small loans from banks to pay for replanting.
Klaus says he believes Claire's study trip to Rossinver will have an important impact on the development of sustainable agriculture in Uganda as it will give her the expertise to set up well-run training programmes.
Over the four months of her visit the centre will also be organising an African day, with African food, music and dance. One reminder of home Claire wasn't expecting to find in Leitrim was a giant calabash or bottle gourd, carefully grown by Klaus in the centre. In Uganda women use the empty shell to carry up to 20 litres of water on their heads. Demonstrating the technique with ease, she explains that they are also used at weddings to carry supplies of the local brew - to use plastic containers is seen as an insult.
Anybody who would like to contribute towards the cost of Claire's trip or to a fund for fuel-saving stoves and the replanting of trees should contact the Organic Centre on 072- 54338. The E-mail address is organiccentre@eircom.net.