Living Stones: Community-Based Nutrition
Living Stones is a special agricultural branch of HEAL Africa. This innovative program for food security introduces new techniques to improve food production, and then shares findings with community groups in Goma and beyond.
Living Stones ("Mawe Hai" in Swahili) is a special agricultural branch of HEAL Africa, begun in January 2003 (led by Agricultural Engineer Bassara Dhena). It introduces vegetables and trees for food and for profit. This innovative program for food security models and introduces new techniques and experiments with new seeds and seed varieties to improve food production, and then introduces findings to community groups in Goma district (in particular to groups of widows), and to returning displaced people in Masisi Territory. Increased production and profits enable local Nehemiah communities to care for the vulnerable among them. Through its seed multiplication center, Living Stones is also promoting medicinal plants (such as artemesia, neem, aloe, and cassia) and reforestation.
Three Congolese agricultural engineers work in this program.
What difference has it made?
- The "Living Stones" program expands by providing new seeds and showing better methods of gardening to people whose livelihood has traditionally been agriculture. This has slowed or ceased due to twelve years of war in North Kivu. Communities invite the Nehemiah program and Living Stones to teach and accompany them.
- Living Stones teaches skills and provides seeds, seedlings, tools and encouragement to hundreds of people. Widows are able to produce both to eat and to sell their production. Twenty hectares of vegetables have been grown so far in 2006.
- A grant from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization provides tools and seeds for returning widows and the communities to which they return-who have themselves been battered by the continued movement of troops through their areas, who loot, rape, kill and destroy harvests and villages.
- The administrator for Masisi Territory asked Mawe Hai to provide seedlings for reforestation: over 30,000 trees were planted in 2006 alone.