Agriculture classes boost quality of life
In a bamboo home on the Filipino island of Poro, a coconut farmer’s wife holds a ginger leaf carefully over a spoon. She squeezes a few drops of juice onto the utensil while her 3-year-old son watches. The drops mix with juice from tamarind leaves, lemoncito leaves and lemon, forming an amber liquid the woman uses to treat her little boy’s cold.
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Rowena Gonato grows these herbs herself in a small garden located a few yards from the front door. That small patch of vegetation changed her life. Before she learned to grow and mix her own herbal medicines, she faced a harsh reality when one or more of her five children fell ill. The income from her husband’s crops did not provide for both healthcare and dinner.
“If I get and pay for medicine, then I have no food,” she says.
Gonato found a solution to this problem — in April 2011, she graduated from a program called Barangay Out Of School Training, or BOOST. “Barangay” refers to small Filipino communities, like the cluster of wooden huts in which Gonato lives.
The program, operated through Baptist Global Response and funded by Southern Baptist World Hunger Funds, educates Filipino villagers about agriculture, herbal medicine, community development and moral values. Southern Baptist churches will observe World Hunger Sunday Oct. 9. International World Hunger Day is Oct. 16.
After six months of BOOST training, the 37-year-old mother learned how to plant and cultivate cucumbers, string beans, squash, spring onions and other vegetables. She learned to care for ginger plants, chili peppers and other ingredients she grinds and mixes together for medicinal syrups and ointments. She learned how to keep her children from dying if they ever contract dysentery.
Gonato learned how to improve her family’s life.
Improving Lives
In the two years that Al Hoopes, IMB missionary, has supervised the program on Poro, he heard several stories like Gonato’s. Hoopes chooses sites suitable for BOOST projects and then sends three Filipino trainers to those areas to live and work among villagers for the duration of BOOST classes.
Why do WHF Projects?
Using the Southern Baptist World Hunger Fund for support, Hoopes pays his trainers a salary and provides seeds and basic equipment for the agricultural projects. The participants, however, do most of the farming during their hands-on training.
At the moment, he and a missionary partner oversee six project sites located on Poro as well as nearby islands such as Cebu. He estimates 600 villagers graduated and most now cultivate their own FAITH gardens. The acronym, “FAITH,” stands for Food Always In The Home. The title reflects Hoopes’ ambition to improve the quality of life for participants.
“(After graduation,) they have a livelihood and they have values,” he says. “They have improved their basic health skills. (They know) how to take care of themselves and their children so they can really live independently.”
In the Philippines, this independence can mean the difference between life and death — especially for children.
Village parents, according to Hoopes, don’t know which herbs and vegetables to cook for well-balanced meals and they have no knowledge of basic healthcare. When children develop diarrhea, parents will deny them water, believing they have too much liquid in their systems. As a result, the children die.
Hoopes knows simple education could save the lives of hundreds of children, but more than that, it can keep them out of prostitution.
When a village family can’t afford to feed their children, they often send them to big cities with brothel recruiters, naively believing their sons or daughters will clean houses or work in shops. Sometimes, parents deliberately sell their offspring into prostitution.
Hoopes believes better income and education can lower child trafficking statistics in the Philippines. Training has become his passion.
“I don’t want children being trafficked. I don’t want children to have to beg for money,” he says. “I want parents to learn that they can provide for their family so that they have good self-esteem about who they are and who they are in their relationship with Jesus Christ.”
Therefore, Hoopes and his team conduct classes in bamboo buildings and instruct villagers on the basics of organic farming. They teach Filipinos to make their own fertilizer from manure and worms. They discourage the use of any unnatural chemicals, and as a result, the communities begin to produce vegetables they can grow with very little start-up cost.
Learning Together
These lessons often take place at a central garden built within the barangay. A few days a week, participants meet together to weed, pick and cultivate community vegetables and then they use the remaining time to tend their own gardens.
Hoopes says this scheduling not only produces sufficient food for the village but it unites workers and strengthens relationships in the community. Filipinos learn to rely on each other as they toil between rows of cucumbers.
“What we do is try to create a community that works together, and so, really, the people get an opportunity to know one another … (as we try to) create a job for the people so they can provide for their families,” he says.
What about follow-up?
Through its trainings, however, the BOOST staff instills their fellow Filipinos with more than ideas of community and organic farming. They demonstrate the love God has given them for the poor. Unlike representatives from other non-profit organizations, BOOST staff members live with villagers and become part of their lives. They become family.
Gloryfe Delefuente cries when she talks about why she became a trainer.
“I have a passion for (villagers) because I love them, and also… (because) I came from a poor family,” she says. “I want to help them and let them know that Jesus loves them.”
As an herbal medicine trainer, Delefuente taught Rowena Gonato to mix ginger, tamarind, lemoncito and lemon into cough syrup. With every spoonful that Gonato feeds her children, Jesus’ love bears results. Through hard work and BOOST training, the coconut farmer’s wife treats her family’s medical issues without sacrificing daily necessities like food.
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its sad how we all have food evbery day and people around the world dont have a meal or money to depend on and even if we give money to them there are still going to be millions of kids still starving and wanting a life we sometimes give for granted. its sad how there are billioners who can burn money but would never help one homeless person. we are all human and we have the right to have a meal on the table every day. if i was older and rich i would help every one i could but im only 13.
its sad:(