Piggery!

I have been spending the past few weeks building a piggery!  It has been a great first project for the team to get their hands dirty in some manual labor in behalf of the pigs.  It was also a good first project for me as the project leader.  I learned a lot about managing a team and a budget.

Yup....it was a dirty job.

The piggery was built on the property of a local woman named Christine.  She’s a school teacher, entrepreneur, and founder of a local private secondary school called Equator College, which was also built on her property.   She wanted to construct an extension to her very small already existing piggery to transform it into a demonstration farm; so that she could teach her friends, neighbors, and some local women’s groups how to alleviate their own poverty through raising pigs. 

Christine, me, and James

Piggeries are incredible income generators in Uganda due to their high turnover rate.  They are cheap to buy when they’re babies, sell for a lot when they’re mature, and they give birth to very large litters.  Not only that, but just about anyone can raise a pig.  The beauty of pig raising is that you can buy a piglet and raise it without having a piggery because they can live just about anywhere and in very little space.  You can start with one pig and raise money to build a piggery by buying and selling their piglets.

I tried to show the progress of the piggery by taking a picture in about the same spot every time.  For all you who want to build your own piggeries, here's how you do it:  Step one is to build a trench and throw big stones in for a foundation:

Step two: start laying bricks and cement on top of the stones:

Step three: put a roof on it!

Simple as that!