People often ask us how we keep so many things going at the same time on Project Canaan. There are a million moving pieces, and for the most part, they all run well (until they don’t 😂). Let me share how we do it! It’s all about our people.
We have 10 departments here on Project Canaan. At the beginning of every month the Project Canaan Leadership Team (PCLT) including Directors, Finance, HR, Operations, IT, Services and US leadership, get together to talk about big picture things and details that needs attention. At the end of the same week all Heads of Department (HOD) gather with the PCLT to share updates from their department and how they are or are not achieving their goals.
It’s a wonderful gathering of like-minded people who have a common goal of bringing HOPE to the kingdom of Eswatini. We learn from each other and there is ALWAYS new information that I glean in those meetings, which I LOVE! We tell our kids that they should never stop learning.
Here are a few things I have learned recently from other departments.
We’ve got worms.
Last week it was reported that have “army worms” on the farm! NOT a good thing – if our grazing cattle eat them they will die. We also are responsible to immediately notify the Ministry of Agriculture. The army worm is much easier to control at its first instar (just soon after hatching). A cocktail of pesticides is used to arrest this notorious intruder, but we have already lost 45 acres (18.2 hectares) of grass pastures, threatening the production of our dairy hay.
Brilliant ideas!
We are setting up the Lusito Service Centre, which will start generating income by servicing outside vehicles. We are three miles from the wonderful Nkonyeni Golf Estate, and our team came up with the brilliant idea of servicing cars while the golfers are doing 4+ hour rounds of golf! We pick up the vehicle, drive it to PC, service and return. How cool is that?
Life lessons are sometimes hard.
This weekend we learned that in order to qualify for the National Swim Competition (called a Gala here) you must swim the 200 IM at least once during the season of galas. Sadly, only six of the 12 children who were told that they were going to the Nationals actually qualified. Six of them either didn’t swim what they were supposed to, or did it in the last gala and were disqualified. After many conversations with a very helpful person from the Association, Ian and I finally understood that we messed up on our end. We had to sit the kids down (separately) and share the hard news, along with the life lesson that adults make mistakes too. We ALL make mistakes. That was not new to us.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank our Swazi Project Canaan Leadership Team for your dedication, hard work, blood, sweat and tears to help all the gears work well so that lives will continued to be saved (photo of our leadership team in the header at the beginning of this blog).
Thanks for staying in touch with all things Project Canaan.
