Food Security Programs
To get our program started, our first task was to try different crops, mostly vegetables and fruits, to identify what would grow best during both the rainy and dry seasons. Amazingly, we’ve yet to find a single fruit, vegetable or grain that we can’t grow in the rich Burundian soil. We now grow, teach and distribute a variety of vegetables and fruits including carrots, cabbages, onions, radishes, amaranth, eggplants, African eggplants, moringa, sweet and hot peppers, soybeans, tomatoes, beans, sweet potatoes, Japanese plums, gooseberries, passion fruit, papaya, pineapple, guava and pomegranate.
Staff and community volunteers harvest from the Food Security Program gardens to distribute food and seedlings to patients and parents of children in our malnutrition ward. They also receive education sessions on nutrition twice a week.
The Food Security Program promotes home gardens in the surrounding communities with 12 staff for home visits. We also provide training programs in our demonstration garden and seedling distribution to outpatients, community volunteers and more distant residents via home visit staff.
The community proposed agricultural cooperatives during the annual VHW forum in December 2010. We provided land, and community members, mostly women, have already established six agricultural cooperatives next to the clinic. Other cooperatives are being started throughout the community with our help. Cooperatives allow groups to grow a greater variety of crops – and get a more diversified diet – as they work together. Today, we’re helping these cooperatives develop internal rules and regulations in order to register and acquire official legal status to apply for local and international grants and loans.
The Food Security Program also has an animal husbandry of chickens and goats. We’re currently using chickens to produce eggs for malnourished patients. The animal dung is used as manure to fertilize our gardens. Ultimately, we will breed enough chickens and goats to establish an animal distribution program.
