Garden to Market- Helping the poor to grow food!

The Hand to Hand Foundation has been working in collaboration with an international school nearby to help bring an awareness of the needs of the poor and working together to create green and sustainable solutions. The primary students at the school formed an echo club and worked in collaboration with hand to hand to determine the types of plants that would help feed the poor. After many discussions the children in the club grew 250 plants including  tomatoes, egg plants, chilies and basil. These were all grown in medium sized bags for easy transportation to the people living in the local slums. Once these bags have been delivered the receiving families can water them and keep them alive to grow a continuous and sustainable food source. It was a great pleasure working with the students, educating them and then witnessing doing something meaningful to help.

It has also been the season to bloom and Pai is very proud of her rose garden. The flowers were grown in our own garden to enjoy!

Thank you to everyone who gives so we can provide not only food but employment as well. Our vegetable garden has continued to grow a bountiful crop and our chooks are laying 60- 80 eggs a day!!!

Links:

• Hand to Hand Foundation

Our chooks have been very busy laying lots of eggs and we have been receiving up to 70 per day!!! We use these eggs to both sell and feed the poor. The young man caring for the chickens is a youth who is recovering from drug addiction. This new responsibility is giving him something meaningful to do whilst also rewarding him with a small income. The road to recovery is long, but he and the chickens are making great progress.

During the evening the chickens are enclosed in a pen to keep them safe and during the day they are allowed to roam around freely. This makes finding and collecting the eggs a little trickier but a happy chook is a healthy one!

Our mushroom project has a new grower wo has recently been rescued from a very violent situation. With no education or income, she felt trapped, unable to flee. The police intervened and now she has a safe place to stay and learning a new set of skills. She is thrilled to participate in the project and is also very happy with the income she is generating too. For her, growing mushrooms is a life changing event!

Our main gardener is still going strong and she loves to take these new people under her wing and teach them. She was also an alcoholic a few years ago, and now is the head gardener.

All of the people in our project keep the money they get from selling their produce. If the foundation would like to use it to feed the poor, we also pay the grower. In this way they see progress immediately which helps restore purpose, worth and self-esteem are essential for starting the healing journey.

This month we also had the opportunity to have 90 international school children over 3 days to see our program and lend a helping hand. Our growers were the teachers and they did an excellent job.

We also grow flowering plants and garden plants which are available for sale.

Links:

• Hand to Hand Foundation