Helping Asians Help Themselves
The lady who was our pioneer in Goducate’s backyard/frontyard veg@table farming project is already seeing the rewards of her labour. Towards the end of November, the manager of our model farm went to Dayap to help Nanayanita turn her frontyard into a vegetable patch. Dayap is the village where victims of 2009 Typhoon Ondoy’s damage in Manila were resettled.
Now she is admiring her long beans and tomatoes.
Sandy, a volunteer at the Goducate model farm, has started to introduce backyard farming to the Talahiban area, where he works. He has “borrowed” 1 kg of African night crawlers from the model farm for the first family in Talahiban to start backyard farming. The condition is that 1 kg of worms will be returned to the farm in 3 months’ time. The worms will be used to make compost.
First, Sandy taught how to make the vermicomposting beds—starting with a layer of banana stalks, then cow manure and other decaying leaves and grass, then the worms, and finally covering everything with banana stalks to maintain a moist environment.
While the guys were making the vermicomposting beds, the mother and some of the children planted the eggplant seedlings brought from the model farm. They also prepared a nursery, in which they sowed eggplant seeds. They will be planting bittergourd and tomatoes within a week.
We hope they will get a harvest in 2 months’ time. Our bigger hope is that other villagers in Talahiban will start backyard farming and that our veg@table program will improve the nutrition of the children in poor villages. It is quite common for poor families to flavor their rice only with packets of instant noodles.
An old friend of mine in Manila called me up one day to ask whether he and his friends could bring some goods for the people Goducate works with in Dayap. This village is a relocation site for the victims of the devastation that Typhoon Ondoy caused in Manila in 2009.
The next day the group travelled 20 miles to distribute 20 boxes of used clothing and 60 kg of rice. The children also received parcels containing stationery donated by the National Bookstore.
Although the people have been given simple houses by the government, many have still to get jobs, and their children’s education was interrupted by the move. In this village Goducate helps the children with tutorials on their schoolwork. Goducate is also running its pilot project on backyard farming here, to help the community put veg@table.
