Meet the kids of Hogar Comunal del Niño, the local daycare at site:
The approximately 25 children who come daily range in age from 2 to 8 and live in the surrounding villages. They come each day to receive 2 meals, breakfast and lunch, meals they would not receive otherwise due to extreme poverty.
Our municipality is one of the poorest in the nation; 70% of which lives on less than 1 USD a day. The inhabitants are primarily Lencan, an indigenous group that has been residing in the region for hundreds of years. Running water and electricity in homes are the exception, and most of the families live a subsistence lifestyle, sell homemade food and artisan items in the local markets or work as day laborers for the local coffee or lumber producers. While the food is delicious and artisan items are beautifully made, they often don't provide enough income to truly increase their standard of living. Too many times, the market is over saturated with women selling the same food and/or artisan items in the same small area (this is a whole other blog post, better written by the business guru, Jacob, so I'll let him tell that one).
A side note: Several local and international NGOs in the area have been working with the local villages to improve the standard of living for many in the region, but the process is slow: 2 steps forward, 1 step back kind of situation. So, while this post may seem a bit depressing, progress definitely has been made in the region... now back to the story.
Our host mom is the director of the daycare and she has put her heart and soul into improving the center, traveling monthly trying to recruit donations and necessities like shoes and clothing for the children.
The first month we were at site she invited Jacob and me to the daycare, and we were met with beautiful smiles and hugs from the children. She showed us the dilapidated facilities, and while there is a roof over their heads (which is not the case in some places), it is nothing compared to a daycare in a more developed country.
Breakfast (like in the photo above) is usually rice milk, made from grinding the rice and running it through a sieve in water (a pound of rice is less than half the price of a carton of milk) and a single pancake per child. Lunch is often rice pudding (which sounds lovely, but has hardly any nutritional content), or rice and beans with a tortilla and sometimes eggs. Unfortunately, the price of eggs just went up .5 lempiras this week, making it even harder for the daycare to purchase protein for the children. On special occasions they'll make chicken and rice soup.
I asked her if they had tried to start a vegetable garden, and she said they could not afford the seeds. So, not wanting to cough up my personal funds (which as a volunteer are tiny anyway), I spoke to my boss in Peace Corps and was put in contact with a Rotary Club in California. After a few emails, I received a certified box full of 250 packets of vegetable seeds, all donated to be used for the daycare. It felt like Christmas!
I brought the box to the daycare and the 3 ladies who make up the staff were elated. We wrote out a plan for the coming months, pinpointing dates to start an abonera (organic compost), to plant the seeds, and to transplant. Unlike most of Honduras, our region gets relatively cold (high-30s to 40s) during December and January. So, we chose mostly root vegetables and hardier crops to withstand the temperatures.
Side note #2: USAID has initiated a program this year throughout the Western corridor of the country, called ACCESO. Focusing on food security, the program, among other things, is intended to diversify the rural Honduran diet through gardens and provide assistance for marketing and selling the surplus, etc...
So, with that in mind, the staff, Jacob and I made the decision to research bio-intensive gardening, as it promotes growing a diverse range of vegetables all within a relatively small space. Only if the garden is so successful that they have a large surplus will we move onto selling the vegetables. That's where Jacob's business skills will come in to play.
Regardless, with bio-intensive gardening we can produce more food in a smaller space by using open pollinated seeds, a double-dig method, companion planting and organic composting. (It's much more complex, but to get the basic idea). We aren't making use of commercial fertilizers for many reasons, one of the main being that they simply can't afford to purchase the fertilizer when they need to purchase necessities and pay the electric bill.
The hardest part will be getting the parents to come and help with the digging and planting. Of course, all of the parents work when they can and taking a day off isn't really an option. The daycare staff thought that the best day to begin digging would be on a holiday when the parents are off. I hope they're right. To compensate for their time, we plan to give a packet of seeds to each family so they can try out the model in their own home, and encourage seed exchanging among their neighbors to further diversify their gardens. Much of the time will be spent demonstrating the double-dig method, creating fresh compost for the spring, and trying to explain why bio-intensive is better to people who have been using the same method of planting for many generations.
I was incredibly surprised to find such a low rate of family gardens when arriving at site. I assumed in my naivety that every family in a developing country has a garden and lives off of it. But, this is not the case, and many people go without vegetables on a daily basis. When families do have a garden, often times (at least in my region) they grow a large amount of a few crops and then sell them at the market. They then use those profits to buy more seeds of the same crop (further depleting the soil). Instead of buying other vegetables at the markets, they usually use the profits to also purchase items such as soft-drinks and processed foods like baloney, chips and candy for their families to show the local community that they are good providers. While being a good provider is very admirable, it doesn't help the family in the long run and only exacerbates chronic malnutrition in the region.
With this model, the parents won't need to use very much space and can add [more] vegetables to their family's diet, still being able to sell the other crops they have been selling. And, hopefully with nutrition classes, maybe they won't use the profits to buy soft-drinks and candy for their children quite as often.
So, how does our garden grow? Well, we've only started composting and have planted 350 seeds, most of which have germinated. We plan to transplant the last week of October and watch the garden grow through the holidays.
The Director of the daycare at left and staff member at right working on the abonera.
I purchased a plastic seed bed holding 200 seeds for my personal use, but decided to break it in using seeds for the local daycare. A plastic seed bed costs roughly 75 Lempiras ($3.96) and is too costly for many here to purchase. So, we gathered up some empty (and free!) egg cartons from around town and are using these as well. Each carton holds 30 eggs, so with 5 cartons we added another 150 seeds to be planted.
Because Jacob and I travel for business/health presentations and trainings, we made a green house to retain moisture, etc... when Jacob and I are away from site. It's our first green house, don't be too harsh :) The staff decided it was best to leave the seedlings at our house, so 50 little hands could get into them, lol.This process will probably take a full two years to create sustainability. The garden won't truly be bio-intensive until then, but we'll get there. We'll harvest everything shortly after the beginning of the year and have our next compost ready for a spring planting of crops which can tolerate the heat (beans to help bring back nitrogen, peppers, tomatoes, watermelon, etc...) We plan to add gardening, seed saving and nutrition classes for the parents of the children at the daycare each month. When the harvest is ready, I also hope to teach a healthy cooking class for the parents using some of the vegetables we grew. Next year we can continue on a similar rotation, giving the staff and parents plenty of repetition to work from. At some point I hope to bring in someone from USAID to present to the parents and staff, but first we need to get the project off... or better yet, in the ground. Baby steps :)
