Your monthly gift of $25 will help us provide life-saving food to the kids of Ngombe Compound. As the donor support grows, we’ll expand our program reaching more kids with more food. If you’d prefer giving a one-time gift, you can do that too. Give a gift online now!
About The 3 Esthers Farm: As we began working on the farm in the fall of 2015 we settled on the name, The 3 Esthers Farm. The 3 Esthers? There was Esther MKandawire in Ngombe; Esther Derr, the Zambian daughter of David and Martha the owners of the farm land; and the third Esther in reference to the scripture verse found in Esther 4:14.
We are working hard to help support 1,400 children at the Needs Care School in Lusaka Zambia. We do that through the 3 Esthers Farm. It’s a beautiful 10 acre property just 25 minutes from the school and it’s fully dedicated to producing food for the school. Maybe one day, after the 1,400 children are receiving a daily lunch of healthy food – we can expand to support additional schools.
“And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this.”
In October 2015 we created a Crowd Funding project to raise money to launch the farm. Our goal was $10,000. By December, we had our funding. Esther had planned a budget that would allow us to build a caretaker’s house, fence the property, drill a well, and begin setting up crops and animal projects.
The 3 Esthers Farm was off to a great start. The farm is 100% dedicated to feeding the hungry children of the Needs Care School. As it grows and prospers, so will they.
Why is the food needed so urgently? Many of the children are HIV Positive and without good nutrition the children won’t be able to battle HIV/AIDS effectively. The reason is simple – they cannot take the anti-retroviral medications they need on an empty stomach, it’s too hard on their system.
This is why the farm, and farm fresh produce, is so vitally important. It will literally extend children’s lives and give them a shot at growing up healthy and well educated.
Esther Lubambe says:
"This is a miracle; I can’t just believe it, we have not received food from people in the last five years, or so. Thank you so much, you don’t know what you have done for us, in this household, I am staying with my husband who is a self security guard and he gets paid ZMK800.00 (roughly $80 USD) per month, this is not enough and does not even take us half a month because we are twelve in the house hold, I sell vegetables at the market just to make ends meet, but it has been so hard the vegetables are not selling as it used to be because this time we have prominent farmers who have started coming in the community with their vehicles and selling their vegetables direct to our buyers taking over our business, and with them they are selling at a wholesale price, which we can’t even compete with.
I had come home to sleep because the vegetables are not selling, and just heard Loveness screaming with joy, that she wanted to eat Nshima (stable food) with her vegetables immediately, as she was not going to wait for the usual time and everyone got so excited that I had no option but to wake up and start preparing the vegetables for our lunch, meaning today we are going to have two meals, this is unbelievable, and I couldn’t believe it that I had to send her sister to go and ask from school where she had gotten the vegetables, and now Esther is here to explain where Loveness got the vegetables, this is so Amazing, really God hears when we ask or cry to Him. We normally have one meal per day, and this is around 4.00pm, but today it’s two meals, I thank God so much for using you generous people by providing for us. Thank you so much may God bless you more."
We pay our farm caretakers to manage the property. They live at the farm and are responsible for the success of the crops.
We are blessed to have a farm truck, but the repair and maintenance is expensive. Fuel costs to transport the food to the Ngombe Community are also something we cover.
There are lots of ongoing costs on a farm from electricity to repair and maintenance of machines, tools, and structures.
We are working hard to fully utilize the entire ten acre parcel. That means ongoing investment in our on-going projects, such as our Banana and Mango orchard and our goat herd. But we also have seasonal crops we plant, such as garden vegetables. These seasonal crops require one-time investments in seedlings several times a year.
