Projects

This project is to purchase 18 threshing machines for 147 households in Heluoshi Xuma village to lessen the villagers’ work load, save time and improve the villagers living condition.

Funds needed: $8,467.9 (57,750rmb)

Lhamotso is from Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China. She graduated with an Associate’s degree in English from the Qinghai Normal University Nationalities Department’s English Training Program in 2005. Currently she is working in Shem Women’s Group as a Program Director and Financial Officer.

Project Location
This project is located in Heluoshi Xuma Village, Tiegai Township, Gonghe County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province. Heluoshi Xuma Village is in the southeastern part of Gonghe County, and it is approximately 170 miles from the capital city of Qinghai Province, Xining City.

Heluoshi Village Background
Heluoshi Xuma Village is historically an agricultural village. The village used to be located opposite of Longyangxia town, but during 1987 and 1988, the whole Heluoshi village transferred to Mahantai area because the government planned to build a hydroelectric station there. Therefore the village had to move. In Heluoshi Xuma Village there are four small groups and these four small groups consist of four different ethnic groups: Tibetan, Chinese, Hui (Muslim) and Mongour.

Population
There are 148 households with 785 people in Heluoshi Xuma Village, and among these 249 are men, 286 are women and 250 are children.

Education
In total, there are approximately 156 school-aged children currently attending school: about 95 are in primary school and kindergarten (39 male students and 56 female students), 27 in middle school (13 male students and 14 female students), 25 in high school (14 male students and 11 female students), and 9 in college, (4 female and 5 male).
A number of children have attended primary school and dropped out because their families could not afford to pay the expensive middle school tuition fees before the government set Free Tuition of The Nine-Year Compensation Education Act. At the present, the kindergarten’s tuition is about 500 rmb, which covers living expenses for each semester. Because of The Nine- Year Compensation Education Act, the students who are in the primary and middle school do not need to pay for the school tuition fees or living expenses.  Students still need to pay for some necessary study needs such as pens, notebooks and reviewing books. After middle school, the students need to pay around 1,500 rmb for school tuition fee each semester. Therefore, fewer and fewer students go to high school because of the expensive school fee. As a result, there are only very few college students who are able to go to school continually in Heluoshi Xuma Village. A few years ago, one boy and one girl earned high marks on the college entrance examination. They received the invitation letters from universities outside the province. Unfortunately, they did not go to college because their families were too poor to pay for the university fees. So now both of them stay at home and help their families to work.  Generally, most villagers who are older than 30 years old haven’t attended primary school.

Cash income
Many families in Heluoshi Xuma village try to earn money as migrant construction workers or dig caterpillar fungus every spring in other places as far as 200 kilometers away. Generally, the price they receive for each large, good quality caterpillar fungus is 10 to 15 rmb and 5 to 10 rmb for each smaller caterpillar fungus. There are not many other opportunities to earn cash income.
Recently, to protect the ecological balance, a new law was passed that forbids people to dig for caterpillar fungus. Still, the villagers secretly dig caterpillar fungus in spring and they can earn about 2,000 rmb over one month after paying a 500 rmb tax for use of the pastureland. Construction workers are often cheated out of their pay: the construction manager promises to pay the workers one month after they finish construction, but when they go to collect their wages, the construction manager cannot be found, and they end up getting paid absolutely nothing for their work. However, some villagers can earn 700-800 rmb in one month by doing construction work if they are not cheated. On average, each family can earn aroun 3,000 rmb per year. A very limited number of families can earn around 5,000 rmb per year by selling surplus grain and the goats’ wool.
Each household’s expenses run about 2,500 rmb per year for purchasing tea, salt, gas and other daily necessities such as water, electricity, fertilizer and clothes. People spend about 900 rmb per year buying fertilizer in the form of urea and amino acids. Each 100 g bag of urea is 95 rmb and each 100 g bag of amino acid is 150 rmb. In addition, school fees cost an average of 1,000 rmb per semester per student. At this point almost all the families have to take out loans because they need to buy fertilizer in spring at the same time the families need to prepare the school fees for their children for attending a new semester.When the loans are due, many villagers borrow money from relatives and friends because they have no money to pay back the loans. Also, some families have to buy flour at the end of the year because their fields do not produce enough food.

Agriculture
Local people usually grow wheat, potatoes, beans and rapeseed. Generally, the climate in Heluoshi Xuma Village is not bad. Barring natural disasters, it may be possible to have a very fruitful harvest each year. However, there is a serious problem with the farmlands, which makes it nearly impossible to have a good harvest. Forty percent of the fields are covered with stones and sand and therefore cannot be used. In addition, the irrigation water is hard to access and use because water is pumped by electricity from a place that is located about 7 or 8 km from the village. The water pump is of inferior quality, and almost never works, so the fields can be irrigated only two or three times every year.
Finally, the amount of land that each person owns is not sufficient to produce any substantial harvest. In addition, due to the lack of rain recently the crops grow very short and it is hard to harvest. All of the above problems result in very poor harvests. Usually, 1 mu of land can only produce between 300 to 400 jin of wheat.
As a result, some families do not produce enough food even for self-consumption, and they must buy wheat, barley, and vegetables from outside. Since Heluoshi Xuma Village is an agricultural village, the villagers mostly eat flour based foods (made from the wheat they grow in the field) and vegetables (some vegetables are grown for self consumption such as carrots, and onions, but most vegetables are bought from Gonghe County). People seldom eat meat because they cannot afford it. They can eat meat (pork) only during festivals. Local villagers mostly eat only one kind of vegetable, the potato, during all the year.

Herding
Most households do not have livestock such as yaks, cows, sheep, and goats in Heluoshi Xuma Village. Only a few of the households have small amounts of sheep, goats and cows. The total number of sheep in Heluoshi Xuma village is around 500-600. There are about 450-550 goats and sheep which are owned by only ten families.  The rest of the livestock are cows. The villagers usually do not sell their livestock, but use them to produce milk and meat. If the villagers need money to pay their children’s school tuition or if a family member gets a serious illness, they will sell livestock to raise cash.

Problems
1. Heavy labor for the local villagers and time consuming on threshing crops
In Heluoshi Xuma Village, five to seven village people usually need to thresh all kinds of grains like wheat, barley, rapeseed and beans from August to middle of September every year. Threshing is very heavy work and it needs to be done very carefully, so usually the local people get up around 4:00 am and display all the bundles of crops on the threshing floor for a while. After that the villagers have to spend the entire day to carry out the different processes until 8:00 pm. So during this period of time the local people usually have dinner at 10:00 pm which is very late. If the weather is nice with not very strong wind, then only one entire day is enough to finish threshing one small portion of the threshing grains and usually each family needs to thresh grains around three or four times. But if it rains or there is no wind at all then the villagers need to continue the unfinished work in the following days. In this case it not only wastes time but also people’s energy. In addition, due to limited threshing floor and labors, one household needs to do threshing several times. Even though threshing grains often takes one day, due to the very intensive work force people still become extremely fatigued.

2. Spend more money on threshing grains
In Heluoshi Xuma, people do not use livestock to thresh crops. Local villagers use the hand tractor to thresh the crops for three to four hours for per time. Using the hand tractor, people need to buy gas for it. Recently the price of gas has largely increased, each liter costs 6.7 rmb and to thresh the crops for one day costs around 47 rmb. Some households rent the threshing machines from other villages and families to thresh and rental fee is around 30 rmb for per hour. On average, each family needs to spend around 280 rmb on threshing crops if they use a hand tractor.

3. Grains easily go bad due to frequent rain
In Heluoshi Xuma Village, people do threshing from August to middle September, the rainiest season of the year. The bundles of crops are usually dried on the threshing floor for two or three weeks after heavy rains. Sometimes if there are lots of rains the grains can easily become spoiled such that they become useless, even for feeding the livestock like cows and pigs.

Benefits
1) If this project is implemented, the villagers will not need to spend time and lots of effort threshing crops. For example one household can finish threshing all their grain within one or two days.  In addition, the workload will be much easier since most of the threshing process can be done by the machine. Having a threshing machine, the villagers can finish the threshing in a short time.  This will free up more time to do  other things like plowing the fields before the land becomes too harsh.
2) If this project provides threshing machines to the villagers in Heluoshi Xuma Village, the villagers can save some money from threshing because the local people will not need to buy gas for hand tractors for this specific use. Instead the villagers can rent out the threshing machines to other villages to earn money for keeping the threshing machines in good condition.
3) If the Heluoshi Xuma villagers have threshing machines, there would be a smaller chance that the grains would become spoiled due to rainy weather.  Since there is no threshing machine for the local villagers to use, they need to transport the gains to the threshing ground for a while and then the families start to thresh the grain which takes time and the other families need to wait. In this case if there is heavy rain then the grains will go bad.  For example if the weather seems not good then the villagers are afraid to start to thresh the grain because they think it will rain, so they will delay the time of threshing. If there are threshing machines, the villagers can definitely thresh the grains so there is a very low chance the grains will become ruined.

Project Goals and beneficiaries
The immediate goal of the project is to purchase 18 threshing machines for 147 households in Heluoshi Xuma village. The overarching goal of this project is to lessen the villagers’ work load, save time and improve the villagers living condition in Heluoshi Xuma Village. This project will directly benefit 147 households of 781 villagers in Heluoshi Xuma village. (One household already has a threshing machine, so this project directly benefits 147 out of the 148 households in Heluoshi).

Gender Equality
It is a custom in most villages that men are good at handling the machines and women do not know anything about machines. Even in some families there are some machines like hand tractors, motorcycles and so on, but the village women do not have any idea how to use them. However, this project can help the village women to know how to use threshing machines because in Heluoshi Xuma Village both men and women do threshing together no matter if they use machines or not. Providing threshing machines can not only greatly benefit both local men and women by making the threshing process more efficient, but it can also provide an opportunity for village women to learn how to use the machines.
Moreover, this project addresses some gender concepts from the project manager. This project is being designed by a woman and this project will be managed and implemented by women. By doing this, the project manager sends an important message to the local women and girls that woman and girls also can make useful contributions to their communities. As a female project manager Lhamotso sets a very positive example for the local villagers. She will serve as an example that sending female children to school is not a waste and will be an important role model for young girls who are currently in school.

Governmental Approval 
The project manager, Lhamotso, had a talk with the local village leader, Qihaiqing. He has been very supportive towards the project and he mentioned it would be very helpful to do this project regarding the development of the local area. Moreover, he said that the government can not provide some threshing machines in order to help the local people to lighten their workload. Therefore, it would be great to implement this project and get some helps from others.

The steps of the project Activities
1. Researched general information about Heluoshi Xuma village in details (Done).
2. Talked to the village leader and local people to discuss whether this project is needed and what kind of benefits they will get from this project (Done).
3. Held a meeting with villagers to decide how to share the threshing machines among several households; explained the local contribution and decided how much they could contribute to this project (Done).
4. Checked out the price of each threshing machine in Hainan Agricultural Machine Company (Done).
5. Receive permission from local government (Done).
6. Write well organized project proposal (Done).
7. Secure the funds for the project.
8. Receive the funding.
9. Collect local contribution with the village leaders.
10. Purchase the threshing machines from Hainan Agricultural Machine Company.
11. Distribute the threshing machines to the villagers.
12. Interview the local beneficiaries.
13. Send final report with pictures and receipts to the donor.

Timeframe
This project will take 10 days to complete from the day it is funded.
2 days: Collect the local contribution.
1 day: Hold a meeting with the villagers and choose 3-5 villagers to purchase the threshing machines.
2 days: Purchase threshing machines from the company and transport to the project site.
2 days: Distribute the threshing machines to the villagers.
3 days: Interview the local beneficiaries and take pictures.

Detailed Budget

Notes:
There are 148 households in Heluoshi Xuma Village in total and one household has already purchased a threshing machine. So we need to purchase 18 threshing machines and eight or nine households will share one. In this case, it is convenient to manage the threshing machines within small groups.

Sustainability
This project is very sustainable for the following reasons. Firstly, Hainan Agricultural Machine Company is a well known company for selling agricultural products in Hainan. Most people purchase the goods from this company because the quality of the products is good and the price is reasonable. Secondly, among different brands of threshing machines, Gansu Weishengta 90 brand (甘肃威圣塔90型) is the best one because of the good quality and is strongly recommended by the other villagers. Thirdly, the company guarantees to repair the machines freely within one year. Finally, the villagers themselves will be responsible for any costs after the company’s warrantee duration. If the threshing machines get problems after the warrantee, villagers can easily get them fixed because of the short distance to Gonghe County, Hainan Prefecture.

Past experiences
Lhamotso (Lily), the project manager, has already successfully completed five small-scale development projects.
The first was a solar cooker project, funded by the Canada Fund in the summer of 2004, which provided 20 solar cookers for the village where the village clinic project is located. During the same year, in the winter Lhamotso managed another solar cooker project funded by the Canada Fund, which provided 30 solar cookers for Heluoshi Xuma village.
Lhamotso also successfully completed two second-hand clothes projects in 2004 and 2005. These clothes were provided by the British Consulate in Shanghai. There were two boxes of second-hand clothes that included shirts, trousers, bags, shoes, hats, toys, sweaters and other things.
Lhamotso completed a greenhouse project in October 2006, funded by the Australian Embassy. Now the project is complete and successfully finished. The whole project cost about 60,000 rmb, not including the local contribution.
In addition, Lhamotso completed a solar cooker project in December of 2006, funded by The Shambala Connection. The whole project cost about 14,300 rmb, not including the local contribution.
Lastly, Lhamotso completed a village clinic project in June 2008, funded by Shem Women’s group’s private donors. The whole project cost about 83,000 rmb.
She is currently in the process of managing the Waku Rarma Village Water and Environment Initiative project for Waku Rarma Village in Xunhua County, Haidong Region, Qinghai Province. This project was funded by the Canada Fund in 2008 and will cost 505,273 rmb in total.

Map of the project location

In the map it shows Heluoshi Village; Heluoshi Xuma Village and Heluoshi Village is the same village.