Food for Life Project
Food for Life in Burundi
In the last week of June Peter Michelson (AU), Yoshi Shimizu (JP) and Alana Bell (US) visited the Food for Life projects in Africa to prepare an interim report for the Foundation. This is a short summary what they have seen and experienced.
In Burundi, a two hour drive which twists through and over the mountains from Bujumbura, the capital, takes you along a road that passes one of those terrible sites, where school children were brutally murdered in the civil war, before taking you to a hamlet called Makebuko Village. Burundi people are always welcoming. However, if you arrive in Mugera in a Scout uniform the greeting is particularly warm, crowd attracting and boisterously noisy. The reason for this is not immediately apparent.
A path through the village leads you up and over a small hillock where you are confronted by a kaleidoscopic panorama of a valley and distant hills shrouded in the rhythm of Africa. Singing hangs in the air as you become conscious of a group of colourfully dressed people working the land below you. It transpires that this group of young farmers, led by Speciose Ciza, are themselves Scouts. Her troop is involved in the Food for Life Project. The members grow vegetables which they use for themselves and their families. The surplus, and there is a surfeit, is sold in the village although some is harvested especially for poor families. The profit is used to buy more seeds so that the process has become self-sustaining. Speciose, who is only 21, is passionate about Food for Life and her skill is such that the whole community has become enthusiastically involved in this popular project. It seems as if many people, not only in the village but from all over the district, want to complete a training course and learn how to either farm or become a better farmer.
And, it is then, amidst this frenetic, cacophony, of activity among the green fields of abundant and healthily growing vegetables that you realize why your welcome as a Scout has been so spontaneously warm!
Pictures by Yoshi Shimizu who lives in France and works regularly for the Foundation.
