Part One
Médecins San Frontier versus the Nutrition Garden; relief versus development; malnutrition emergency or chronic underdevelopment; short term thinking or long term sustainability; compassion or suffering; helping or hindering. These are the dichotomies of development, these are the questions we struggle with, and the struggle becomes even greater when you see the skin and bones of a malnourished child laid out in front of you. To those of us looking in from the outside, the ‘malnutrition crisis’ that was brought to MSF’s attention this past summer in Southern CAR was indeed a crisis. However, to those daily working with the hungry and malnourished, the increased number of malnourished patients was a surge above normal, but not so unusual as to be termed a crisis. Every time I visit the nutrition centre I am pained by what I see. Children who have no more meat on their bones than the starving children whose pictures we saw during the Ethiopian famine. But there is no famine here. Looking around at the dry season landscape in Gamboula, everything is lush and green, gardens are full of manioc and there is meat in the markets to buy.
The major sources of malnutrition and hunger in the area include chronic underdevelopment, changes in lifestyle among the Fulani who have been displaced and are undergoing drastic livelihood changes, the downfall of the diamond industry (people moved from farming to artisanal diamond mining, leaving them extremely vulnerable to changes in diamond demand with no sure food supply to fall back on) and the breakdown of the family. Given this context, hunger is not the result of a natural disaster, the immediate effect of armed conflict or climate change (droughts or flooding). So given the situation, is relief a viable option?
Nadege, the nutrition garden supervisor, related a story to me about the months that MSF was helping with the nutrition emergency in Gamboula. Last September, after conducting food security surveys around the area, MSF and Action Contre la Faim (ACF) declared a nutrition emergency in southwest CAR and set up emergency feeding centres. One of these centres was established in Gamboula and people were brought from all over the region for treatment here. MSF, a very compassion driven organization, specializes in emergency medical relief, including the treatment of malnourished children. In four days to a week, they can rehabilitate a child swollen with kwashiorkor, one of the most severe forms of malnutrition. The treatment consists of a variety of ‘chemicals’ as they are termed here in Gamboula. Essentially, specially formulated milk formulas, vitamins, protein powders and the like. Things not available in the local market anywhere, but therapeutic foods designed specifically for the quick treatment of malnutrition. The staff of MSF are very good at what they do, but one must ask if their methods are the most appropriate for the Gamboula context.
Unfortunately, the children treated by MSF, while they did recover, went right back to their homes, to the very setting that landed them in the feeding centre in the first place. In the week they were at the hospital, nothing changed in thier families’ ability to feed itself or access nutritious food. In addition, they learned little while staying with MSF to help change the family situation. We are thankful to MSF, however, as they did an excellent job of giving additional training to the nutrition centre staff and as a result the centre has changed some of its practices. With the help of donors, the centre has increased the amount of milk powder available which has, in turn, allowed the staff to feed children a nutritious porridge 4 times a day and a protein rich milk 6 times a day, including a feeding at two in the morning!
I did want to share Nadege’s perspective on one of the results of MSF’s time in Gamboula. She says, during a child’s stay with MSF everything is done for them. There are staff to sweep the floors of all the tents, to wash the laundry, to cook and serve meals to the parents and the children, to do the dishes afterwards and to even wash the children if the parents are too tired. Essentially, as Nadege saw it, there was someone hired to look after all of the patients needs, not too unlike North American hospitals. On top of this, the treatment is free, MSF provides or pays for transport to and from its clinic and provides some rations for the continued treatment at home.
Compare this with the Gamboula Baptist hospital. There is one staff person on duty at any one time. Patients’ families are responsible for sweeping out the rooms and keeping things clean, for doing laundry and dishes, for preparing meals, porridge and milk for the children and are required to take turns going to the nutrition garden to collect food from Nadege to prepare. Nadege remarked that several of the patients that were treated by MSF, on their return home, fell back into severe malnutrition, and once MSF was gone, they came to the Gamboula hospital for treatment. The women complained severely and said that when they were with MSF they did not have to do anything, but at the nutrition centre they had to do all kinds of things. Nadege said she had many women refuse to come to the garden to work or even collect greens to cook for themselves to eat. Nadege asked the women, “when you leave the hospital and go home, will someone be there to do all these things for you?” Their reply, obviously was no, and slowly they realized the importance of the learning that was going on in both the nutrition centre and garden. If nothing changes at home, the same conditions will result in sick children or their eventual death.
So this leads me to ask, when does our ‘helping’ lead to our ‘hindering’ of development? When we give freely from a heart of compassion, for very good and noble reasons, like the risk of the death of a child, are we possibly causing more harm than good in the long run? Is relief given in a non-emergency situation a hindrance to development rather than a leg-up to development? If we always see people as poor and unable to provide for themselves, does this also help create the conditions for poverty? When we make excuses for people’s actions, or believe that because of cultural norms certain practices will never take root, are we not laying hope aside and giving up prematurely?
Friday, March 12, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Hunger in Eden
The BBC published this set of photos recently which helps visually explain why there is hunger in SW CAR despite the conditions for productive agriculture. I will be heading to CAR shortly to help get the new CEFA project up and running. CEFA, or Centre d'Experimentation et de Formation Agricole will be an experimentation and demonstration farm that will help people in south west CAR to be more productive farmers. We will also be demonstrating and training people in the production of more nutritious crops such as legumes, vegetables and peanuts.
(The men in the first photo are nurses from the Gamboula Hospital health outreach team.)
Saturday, December 26, 2009
CAR becomes tourist destination for January 2010
The Central African Republic has more going for it than malnutrition and conflict. Even more than elephants and gorillas. It will be spoiled this year with an event not to be seen again until 3043. Curious?
The first significant astronomical event of the year takes place on 15 January, when an annular eclipse occurs over Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean. An annular eclipse is one in which the Moon does not completely obscure the Sun and a thin ring of sunlight remains visible. Annular eclipses occur when the Moon is at its farthest point from the Earth. It can be seen in Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Maldives, south-eastern India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and central China, and will last between eight and 11 minutes, depending on location. This duration will not be exceeded again until the year 3043.
Check out the UK Independent for the rest of the article.
Monday, December 21, 2009
The Gamboula Nutrition Garden: An overview
I thought I would share this article I wrote to give everyone a better picture of what the Nutrition Garden is all about. This program, supported by individuals in Canada and the United States, was also the subject of my Master’s thesis. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at spoiledfornormal@gmail.com.
Case study of the Gamboula Nutrition Garden, Central African Republic
1. Background
The social impacts of the current crisis in the Central African Republic have been felt the hardest by women and children. The lack of health care, clean water and sanitation contributes to and exacerbates malnutrition among children. There is 38% global chronic malnutrition in the country, with which numerous long-term effects have been associated. Forty-three percent of the population, or 1.6 million people, are currently food insecure in CAR to date. This is not due to lack of land as only 4.4% of the arable land in CAR is currently in use. Rather, evidence points to the lack of variety in the diet coupled with the current insecurities in the country and the effects of the global economic crisis for the high level of food insecurity.
In an effort to help stem some of the underlying causes of malnutrition, Evangelical Covenant missionary Roy Danforth started a large fruit tree orchard behind the Gamboula II Eglise Evangélique Baptiste (EEB) hospital in 1998. The fruits produced were intended to provide food for the nutrition centre as well as provide an opportunity for hospital patients to become acquainted with new fruits introduced through a large scale agroforestry program in the area. In 2006, a nutrition garden was added to the orchard and the Women and Children Gardening for Health (WCGH) program was started.
The WCGH program is hosted by the Gamboula Nutrition Centre, a ministry of the EEB hospital in Gamboula, CAR. The hospital receives minimal outside funding and is based on a user-fee system. The nutrition centre charges patients per room and for other medical charges such as medicines, intravenous supplies or blood transfusions. All of the food is provided free and is supplied by the nutrition garden, by the World Food Program or via donations from expatriates living in the area. The nutrition centre treats, on average, one hundred children per year, though this figure is expected to be much higher for 2009. The physical effects of malnutrition, such as marasmus, kwashiorkor and chronic undernourishment, are treatable through remediation in the hospital’s nutrition centre. However, many families return to the same farming practices and the same lack of variety in the diet that contributed to the malnutrition in their family in the first place.
Gamboula is a town of around 5,000 people situated twenty-five kilometres from the border of Cameroon and thus in close proximity to thousands of Fulani refugees who fled from recent violence in the north. Gamboula itself is also host to hundreds of Fulani IDP’s and people of several other Bantu tribes. The primary occupation of the people in the region is subsistence farming, particularly after the closure of a large tobacco company that employed nearly five hundred people, as well as the closure of a large forestry camp in the nearby town of Bamba. Gamboula is situated on the main access road between the capital city of Cameroon, Yaoundé, and the capital of CAR, Bangui.
2. Purpose of the WCGH program
The WCGH program and the nutrition garden are uniquely situated to help children and their caregivers recover from severe malnutrition as well as provide training to caregivers to prevent the recurrence of malnutrition. The WCGH program serves two main functions. The nutrition garden provides food for the nutrition centre as a means to meet the immediate dietary needs of the children in the centre. In the nutrition centre, nutritious food is good medicine. In addition to introducing healthy foods into their diets, the garden also serves as a model for teaching mothers gardening techniques so that they and their families can begin or improve upon their own gardens and remain healthy. The WCGH program provides a machete, vegetable seeds, fruit tree seedlings and other planting material to each woman who completes ten hours of work/training in the nutrition garden.
3. Size and composition
The nutrition garden is approximately twelve acres in size and consists of seven acres of fruit trees and five acres of vegetable gardens and field crops. The fruit tree portion of the garden was planted in 1998 and the fruit is consumed by the nutrition centre while the seeds are saved for use in the fruit tree nursery of the Gamboula Agroforestry Program. Space for vegetable gardens and field crops was added in late 2005. Vegetable gardening is the main dry season activity while field crops such as beans, improved cassava, yam, sweet potato, peanuts, egusi melon, Fulani potato and corn are the focus of the rainy season.
4. Program Activities
Training – The WCGH program currently supports one full-time staff person who is responsible for the oversight of the garden, food production and training of the women from the nutrition centre. Women whose children are hospitalized are encouraged to work in the garden three days a week, during which time their ‘work’ is actually hands-on training combined with direct lessons. Each woman who completes ten hours of training is given a machete, vegetable seeds and fruit tree seedlings to take home.
Food production – All food produced in the nutrition garden is given to the nutrition centre. The nutrition centre relies on the food produced in the garden in order to care for the children in the centre. Without the garden the centre is at risk of closing due to lack of funds to purchase food. Excess food is given to the caregivers of the children, often women who are also malnourished and other children who are staying at the hospital with them. There is no food service at the hospital beyond what the nutrition garden provides. The nutrition centre staff teach women how to prepare crops introduced through the nutrition garden in culturally appropriate and palatable ways to aid in the adoption of these crops in the home garden.
Follow-up – Following up with women once they return home is essential to their success in incorporating what they have learned while participating in the WCGH program. Each woman is visited three times in the first year after leaving the hospital, in conjunction with the three growing seasons in the region.
Materials distribution – Each woman that participates in the WCGH program, completing ten hours of hands on training in the nutrition garden receives a machete, as well as vegetable seeds and fruit tree seedlings, according to her needs. Approximately half the caregivers attending to children in the nutrition centre participate in the WCGH program. Fruit trees were recently added to the list of materials that women could request to take home with them after hearing accounts of women taking seeds home from fruits they had eaten in the nutrition centre. Some women, whose children have a long stay in the hospital, some as long as three months, plant seeds in plastic sacks, placing them outside their rooms to grow. Many of the most popular fruit tree species seeds do not travel well, thus the decision to provide seedlings of fruit trees rather than seeds. The most sought after fruit trees in the nutrition garden include jackfruit, carambola, Madagascar plum, oil palm, breadfruit and canistel.
Experimentation – Within the space available in the nutrition garden, we undertake experiments in new gardening techniques as well as variety trials of species we would like to make available to the program’s beneficiaries. Experiments to date have included trial plots of inter-planted crops including papaya and pineapple; bananas, plantain, sweet potato and taro; vetiver mulch on vegetable beds; and yam cultivation. Variety trials included seventeen varieties of beans collected from Kenya, six cowpea varieties provided by ECHO as well as trials of other beans varieties gleaned from local markets, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While performing experiments in a demonstration/production garden is not ideal, as visitors may mistake trial crops for successful introductions, they do help promote the idea of local experimentation. Experiments planned for the future include trying different methods of seed preservation and storage and Moringa production and processing.
‘Serial staffing’ – Funding is by far the biggest limiting factor to the activities carried out in the nutrition garden. Currently, the program budget can only support two full time staff people, one sentry and funds to hire temporary labour when needed. The senior staff person is responsible for planning all of the garden’s activities, conducting follow-up, vegetable and fruit collection for the nutrition centre and training the women who participate in the WCGH program from the nutrition centre. In place of a second full-time staff person, the program hires women on a weekly rotation. In other words, each week one woman is hired to work for one week for a set salary to do various labour tasks in the garden under the oversight of the garden supervisor. Women who request work in the nutrition garden are added to a growing list of names. Each week, the first person on the list is notified of her up-coming week of work and she has the option at the end of the week to put her name back on the list, at the bottom. When this system was started the project already had a list of fifty-three women requesting work. This process, called ‘serial staffing’, meets several needs of the nutrition garden. First, it fills a need for temporary, unskilled labour in the nutrition garden, freeing the supervisor to conduct training or follow-up activities. Second, it helps the project fulfill its mandate of teaching women about adding variety to the families’ diet through gardening by exposing many more women from the community to the activities and crops of the nutrition garden. Through their week of work women are exposed to the various training activities, crops and techniques that they may not otherwise have the opportunity to see. Third, serial staffing helps take the pressure off of the Central African staff to hire friends or relatives for a single full-time position, spreading the opportunity for work among more than fifty women in the community each year. It also allows the permanent staff the opportunity to observe who they may want to hire in the future based on their skill and work ethic displayed during their week of work in the garden.
Large tasks are accomplished by hiring groups of women to perform certain jobs on contract, with a set lump sum agreed upon for the work. The project most often hires women’s groups from local churches who are raising funds in order to attend or host conferences. Most often this task work is used for clearing fields for planting, making large amounts of compost or for weeding in the fruit tree orchard. Most recently, the project has started to include a training component in the task work, taking one hour in the beginning of the work project to teach on composting, tree planting or other important topics.
5. Challenges
Seed production is by far the biggest challenge for the nutrition garden. Many of the plants grown in the garden originate from seeds collected on trips throughout the Central African Republic and the Congo as well as seed sent from ECHO. These seeds are essentially irreplaceable and great care is taken in the nutrition garden to ensure that each time these crops are planted, a certain number of plants are set aside for seed collection rather than food production. However, crops set aside for seed collection are often harvested for food by hospital patients or their families out of desperation and hunger. The nutrition garden is often visited by people other than those connected to the nutrition centre and crops are often stolen, including those set aside for seed. The nutrition garden collects seed in order to replant in the garden as well as to distribute to WCGH participants.
In an effort to protect and preserve the garden’s valuable and often rare seeds, the project has started to engage local farmers in contract growing. Seeds are given to local farmers who are known to be good growers, with the understanding that the nutrition garden will buy whatever seed the farmer produces at a predetermined price. So far, contract growing has been tried for growing certain varieties of beans not available in local markets as well as some vegetables that are not common in local gardens. Issues of seed quality have yet to be addressed and standards will need to be put in place if the scale of contract growing for the nutrition garden grows. Along with seed production, the nutrition garden struggles with seed storage. Methods for seed storage gleaned from ECHO will be addressed in the coming year.
6. Conclusion
The Gamboula Nutrition Garden and its Women and Children Gardening for Health Program, is an example of how agricultural development can effectively intersect with relief. The WCGH program profits from the ‘captive audience’ of women tending to their malnourished children to introduce nutritious foods to their diet, expose women to greater diversity in the diet and garden as well as valuable nutrition training, all in an effort to prevent their subsequent children from becoming malnourished. In many cases desperation leads to opportunity. The same opportunities for intersecting development with relief exist in IDP or refugee camps, hospitals or schools. Given the right setting, projects similar to the Gamboula Nutrition Garden may be appropriate.
WCGH is a project of NMSI (www.nmsi.org) and CEFA (a non-denominational, non-for-profit organization registered in the Central African Republic).
Case study of the Gamboula Nutrition Garden, Central African Republic
1. Background
The social impacts of the current crisis in the Central African Republic have been felt the hardest by women and children. The lack of health care, clean water and sanitation contributes to and exacerbates malnutrition among children. There is 38% global chronic malnutrition in the country, with which numerous long-term effects have been associated. Forty-three percent of the population, or 1.6 million people, are currently food insecure in CAR to date. This is not due to lack of land as only 4.4% of the arable land in CAR is currently in use. Rather, evidence points to the lack of variety in the diet coupled with the current insecurities in the country and the effects of the global economic crisis for the high level of food insecurity.
In an effort to help stem some of the underlying causes of malnutrition, Evangelical Covenant missionary Roy Danforth started a large fruit tree orchard behind the Gamboula II Eglise Evangélique Baptiste (EEB) hospital in 1998. The fruits produced were intended to provide food for the nutrition centre as well as provide an opportunity for hospital patients to become acquainted with new fruits introduced through a large scale agroforestry program in the area. In 2006, a nutrition garden was added to the orchard and the Women and Children Gardening for Health (WCGH) program was started.
The WCGH program is hosted by the Gamboula Nutrition Centre, a ministry of the EEB hospital in Gamboula, CAR. The hospital receives minimal outside funding and is based on a user-fee system. The nutrition centre charges patients per room and for other medical charges such as medicines, intravenous supplies or blood transfusions. All of the food is provided free and is supplied by the nutrition garden, by the World Food Program or via donations from expatriates living in the area. The nutrition centre treats, on average, one hundred children per year, though this figure is expected to be much higher for 2009. The physical effects of malnutrition, such as marasmus, kwashiorkor and chronic undernourishment, are treatable through remediation in the hospital’s nutrition centre. However, many families return to the same farming practices and the same lack of variety in the diet that contributed to the malnutrition in their family in the first place.
Gamboula is a town of around 5,000 people situated twenty-five kilometres from the border of Cameroon and thus in close proximity to thousands of Fulani refugees who fled from recent violence in the north. Gamboula itself is also host to hundreds of Fulani IDP’s and people of several other Bantu tribes. The primary occupation of the people in the region is subsistence farming, particularly after the closure of a large tobacco company that employed nearly five hundred people, as well as the closure of a large forestry camp in the nearby town of Bamba. Gamboula is situated on the main access road between the capital city of Cameroon, Yaoundé, and the capital of CAR, Bangui.
2. Purpose of the WCGH program
The WCGH program and the nutrition garden are uniquely situated to help children and their caregivers recover from severe malnutrition as well as provide training to caregivers to prevent the recurrence of malnutrition. The WCGH program serves two main functions. The nutrition garden provides food for the nutrition centre as a means to meet the immediate dietary needs of the children in the centre. In the nutrition centre, nutritious food is good medicine. In addition to introducing healthy foods into their diets, the garden also serves as a model for teaching mothers gardening techniques so that they and their families can begin or improve upon their own gardens and remain healthy. The WCGH program provides a machete, vegetable seeds, fruit tree seedlings and other planting material to each woman who completes ten hours of work/training in the nutrition garden.
3. Size and composition
The nutrition garden is approximately twelve acres in size and consists of seven acres of fruit trees and five acres of vegetable gardens and field crops. The fruit tree portion of the garden was planted in 1998 and the fruit is consumed by the nutrition centre while the seeds are saved for use in the fruit tree nursery of the Gamboula Agroforestry Program. Space for vegetable gardens and field crops was added in late 2005. Vegetable gardening is the main dry season activity while field crops such as beans, improved cassava, yam, sweet potato, peanuts, egusi melon, Fulani potato and corn are the focus of the rainy season.
4. Program Activities
Training – The WCGH program currently supports one full-time staff person who is responsible for the oversight of the garden, food production and training of the women from the nutrition centre. Women whose children are hospitalized are encouraged to work in the garden three days a week, during which time their ‘work’ is actually hands-on training combined with direct lessons. Each woman who completes ten hours of training is given a machete, vegetable seeds and fruit tree seedlings to take home.
Food production – All food produced in the nutrition garden is given to the nutrition centre. The nutrition centre relies on the food produced in the garden in order to care for the children in the centre. Without the garden the centre is at risk of closing due to lack of funds to purchase food. Excess food is given to the caregivers of the children, often women who are also malnourished and other children who are staying at the hospital with them. There is no food service at the hospital beyond what the nutrition garden provides. The nutrition centre staff teach women how to prepare crops introduced through the nutrition garden in culturally appropriate and palatable ways to aid in the adoption of these crops in the home garden.
Follow-up – Following up with women once they return home is essential to their success in incorporating what they have learned while participating in the WCGH program. Each woman is visited three times in the first year after leaving the hospital, in conjunction with the three growing seasons in the region.
Materials distribution – Each woman that participates in the WCGH program, completing ten hours of hands on training in the nutrition garden receives a machete, as well as vegetable seeds and fruit tree seedlings, according to her needs. Approximately half the caregivers attending to children in the nutrition centre participate in the WCGH program. Fruit trees were recently added to the list of materials that women could request to take home with them after hearing accounts of women taking seeds home from fruits they had eaten in the nutrition centre. Some women, whose children have a long stay in the hospital, some as long as three months, plant seeds in plastic sacks, placing them outside their rooms to grow. Many of the most popular fruit tree species seeds do not travel well, thus the decision to provide seedlings of fruit trees rather than seeds. The most sought after fruit trees in the nutrition garden include jackfruit, carambola, Madagascar plum, oil palm, breadfruit and canistel.
Experimentation – Within the space available in the nutrition garden, we undertake experiments in new gardening techniques as well as variety trials of species we would like to make available to the program’s beneficiaries. Experiments to date have included trial plots of inter-planted crops including papaya and pineapple; bananas, plantain, sweet potato and taro; vetiver mulch on vegetable beds; and yam cultivation. Variety trials included seventeen varieties of beans collected from Kenya, six cowpea varieties provided by ECHO as well as trials of other beans varieties gleaned from local markets, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While performing experiments in a demonstration/production garden is not ideal, as visitors may mistake trial crops for successful introductions, they do help promote the idea of local experimentation. Experiments planned for the future include trying different methods of seed preservation and storage and Moringa production and processing.
‘Serial staffing’ – Funding is by far the biggest limiting factor to the activities carried out in the nutrition garden. Currently, the program budget can only support two full time staff people, one sentry and funds to hire temporary labour when needed. The senior staff person is responsible for planning all of the garden’s activities, conducting follow-up, vegetable and fruit collection for the nutrition centre and training the women who participate in the WCGH program from the nutrition centre. In place of a second full-time staff person, the program hires women on a weekly rotation. In other words, each week one woman is hired to work for one week for a set salary to do various labour tasks in the garden under the oversight of the garden supervisor. Women who request work in the nutrition garden are added to a growing list of names. Each week, the first person on the list is notified of her up-coming week of work and she has the option at the end of the week to put her name back on the list, at the bottom. When this system was started the project already had a list of fifty-three women requesting work. This process, called ‘serial staffing’, meets several needs of the nutrition garden. First, it fills a need for temporary, unskilled labour in the nutrition garden, freeing the supervisor to conduct training or follow-up activities. Second, it helps the project fulfill its mandate of teaching women about adding variety to the families’ diet through gardening by exposing many more women from the community to the activities and crops of the nutrition garden. Through their week of work women are exposed to the various training activities, crops and techniques that they may not otherwise have the opportunity to see. Third, serial staffing helps take the pressure off of the Central African staff to hire friends or relatives for a single full-time position, spreading the opportunity for work among more than fifty women in the community each year. It also allows the permanent staff the opportunity to observe who they may want to hire in the future based on their skill and work ethic displayed during their week of work in the garden.
Large tasks are accomplished by hiring groups of women to perform certain jobs on contract, with a set lump sum agreed upon for the work. The project most often hires women’s groups from local churches who are raising funds in order to attend or host conferences. Most often this task work is used for clearing fields for planting, making large amounts of compost or for weeding in the fruit tree orchard. Most recently, the project has started to include a training component in the task work, taking one hour in the beginning of the work project to teach on composting, tree planting or other important topics.
5. Challenges
Seed production is by far the biggest challenge for the nutrition garden. Many of the plants grown in the garden originate from seeds collected on trips throughout the Central African Republic and the Congo as well as seed sent from ECHO. These seeds are essentially irreplaceable and great care is taken in the nutrition garden to ensure that each time these crops are planted, a certain number of plants are set aside for seed collection rather than food production. However, crops set aside for seed collection are often harvested for food by hospital patients or their families out of desperation and hunger. The nutrition garden is often visited by people other than those connected to the nutrition centre and crops are often stolen, including those set aside for seed. The nutrition garden collects seed in order to replant in the garden as well as to distribute to WCGH participants.
In an effort to protect and preserve the garden’s valuable and often rare seeds, the project has started to engage local farmers in contract growing. Seeds are given to local farmers who are known to be good growers, with the understanding that the nutrition garden will buy whatever seed the farmer produces at a predetermined price. So far, contract growing has been tried for growing certain varieties of beans not available in local markets as well as some vegetables that are not common in local gardens. Issues of seed quality have yet to be addressed and standards will need to be put in place if the scale of contract growing for the nutrition garden grows. Along with seed production, the nutrition garden struggles with seed storage. Methods for seed storage gleaned from ECHO will be addressed in the coming year.
6. Conclusion
The Gamboula Nutrition Garden and its Women and Children Gardening for Health Program, is an example of how agricultural development can effectively intersect with relief. The WCGH program profits from the ‘captive audience’ of women tending to their malnourished children to introduce nutritious foods to their diet, expose women to greater diversity in the diet and garden as well as valuable nutrition training, all in an effort to prevent their subsequent children from becoming malnourished. In many cases desperation leads to opportunity. The same opportunities for intersecting development with relief exist in IDP or refugee camps, hospitals or schools. Given the right setting, projects similar to the Gamboula Nutrition Garden may be appropriate.
WCGH is a project of NMSI (www.nmsi.org) and CEFA (a non-denominational, non-for-profit organization registered in the Central African Republic).
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
World Food Day
Today is World Food Day, October 16, 2009. I challenge each of you to remember those who struggle to feed their families with each bite that you take today. There is enough food in the world to feed EVERYONE, but not everyone has equal access to the world's abundance. Should we be consuming too much when others cannot consume enough?
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Spoiled with bikes
Darren and I became a four bike family today. That is to say that we both bought new bikes after attending a warehouse sale this morning. We did our research, showed up early and took our picks out for a test ride. I have wanted a mountain bike for some time now and have put off this extravagant purchase thinking that one bike was plenty for one person to own. Well, I have changed my mind and am looking forward to taking on some of Victoria's easier mountain bike trails. I am open for suggestions and riding partners but I warn you that I am quite a conservative rider and don't favor trails with jumps, stumps and other face breaking obstacles. Darren also bought a new mountain bike as this is definitely a team sport for us and with the long walk finished we are on to our next recreational accomplishment, learning to ride off road. We are also confident that these bikes will be traveling with us to our next overseas destination so we can ride out to fields instead of walking. It is a more efficient means of transportation than your feet and fun too!
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