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RSSNew Tools, More Food and a Lot More Time
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
2/11/2007
It isn't that the people of the Philippines don't know how to farm -- two-thirds of the rural population of the Philippines makes a living by subsistence farming. They've cultivated the rich soil of those beautiful islands for millennia, using methods handed down from generation to generation.
But there are immense cities there now, as there were not in ancient times. The water has changed: more demands are placed upon it, and ancient sanitation methods falter under the weight of a larger population, a reality felt in rural areas as well as in urban ones. And the natural disasters to which the region is vulnerable make their deadly appearance regularly, sweeping away entire crops and leaving farm families with nothing to show for months of backbreaking work. Forty percent of the population of the Philippines lives in poverty.
But in the villages of Basao and Makilo in the northern region of the Philippines, Episcopal Relief and Development has assisted the diocese in the building of an irrigation system that will allow for two crops per year, instead of just one, and render land that has been non-arable useful and productive. With our support, ERD has also provided mechanized mills and threshing equipment there and in other villages, making it possible for families to process the grain they raise much more quickly than they could when the women and children had to pound it all by hand.
More food, processed more quickly. More to eat and more to sell. A machine that can give a hardworking family the precious gift of time: time for other kinds of work, time to go to school. So that their minds can be nourished, as well as their bodies, and their future can be the richer, wider one for which their parents long.
