Giving seeds of hope this Christmas
 Beauty’s children, like so many others in Zimbabwe, will suffer from hunger this Christmas. Credit: Richard Wainwright/Act for Peace |
Your gifts to the Christmas Bowl can help Zimbabwean families facing severe hunger
Beauty andher husband work all day under the boiling sun, but their backbreaking efforts just aren’t enough to feed their children. There are the occasional government food handouts, but there’s never enough to go around. By learning a new farming technique, they could change their lives forever.There are so many farmers like Beauty who are still using the old techniques and struggling to grow enough food to feed their children.
Once, Jessina felt despair just as Beauty. She too was no longer able to grow enough in her fields to support her family.
“I felt very bad because I could only feed my family once every day.” she said.
Jessina was about to give up hope, when visited by a field coordinator for Act for Peace’s partner, Christian Care, who offered to teach her a new way of farming. Called conservation farming, it involves new techniques like digging individual pits for each maize plant or covering soil with mulch. Using this methods, Jessina turned her plot from a barely fertile wasteland to a thriving farm, using the extra money from selling her crops to buy animals.
“I’m now in my third year, and I have many goats, turkeys, guinea fowl and chickens. We used to have a lot more chickens but we ate them!” she says.
Jessina knows that she’ll be able to manage even in drought years thanks to the techniques she’s learnt. She can now send her children to school and believes that they will have a better future. Jessina is so glad to have joined the conservation farming program.
“I hope my children will learn from me what I have learnt so that they have an improved life,” she says.
As the drought continues, the situation is only getting worse. Without being able to learn conservation farming the way Jessina did, the future for many Zimbabwen families looks grim.
Your gifts can help families in Zimbawe.