The Johnson Road property is about 40 acres of land that will be the site for a vocational training school run by the Fiji College of Theology and Evangelism. The school hopes to set up a site to train "the poorest of the poor", while also providing for some of their own financial needs, as the school does not charge its students tuition.
The land is beautiful- lush hills surrounded on two sides by distant green mountains. Earlier this week a few of us hiked around it for an hour or so dreaming about what crops could be grown but also cataloguing many of the challenges with the land.
The biggest challenge is also the simplest the fix. The school has quite a bit of land and people willing to help work the land, however they don't have a way to turn the overgrown land into property that is usable. The school does not have a properly functioning tractor, so it is difficult to properly plow forty acres let alone one.
Currently the school growing a few things on a very small patch of their property, but it is hardly enough to use as a vocational training school, to grow enough crops to sell at the market, or even to provide a significant amount of food for the students attending the school. To purchase a tractor costs about $12,000 USD, which is an amount the school could not afford. Our hope and prayer is to help identify someone who would be willing to donate a tractor and help ship it over. That would serve as the "catalyst", which would hopefully help the school become independent of overseas financial support (or at least moreso) after the initial investment.
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