Villagers harvest fish from pond floor once it's drained.
Working in the village of Buntubat, OBI hatched plans to help a local missionary build two more tilapia ponds, but this time with a twist: the side by side ponds will be fished not by nets, but by draining the ponds of their water. That water then goes to water nearby garden projects.
Operation Blessing's outreach center director for French-speaking Africa, Jon Cassel explains how it works. "After you drain a pond, you just get a whole mass of villagers to harvest the fish stranded on the pond floor. The fish are on top of the mud, flopping around, but the mud is moist enough so that the fish don't die."
Large fish are put into bags and sold at market. Smaller fish get transferred to another pond for a few more months in order to grow to marketable size. The ponds are harvested twice a year.
The integration helps unify the community. The OBI team's project was aimed at demonstrating God's love by meeting physical and spiritual needs.
