When Chad Roberts lost his job two years ago, he never dreamed he’d be unemployed this long. He was a machinist, forklift operator, and could drive just about anything. But living in Ashe County, North Carolina where unemployment has hovered between 12%- 15% and three major manufacturers have been shuttered, Chad’s job opportunities were few and far between. Nobody called him back on his job applications, and nobody seemed to be hiring.
Chad started to get depressed, had trouble sleeping, and began to pack on the pounds, despite the fact his family was existing on food stamps and meals from the food pantry. Then this spring, he filled out a survey at the pantry about gardening and the next thing he knew, Travis Birdsell and Pastor Rob Brooks of Outgrow Hunger were offering to come over, till his land out back, and help him start a garden.
And boy howdy, is Chad growing things now! His tomatoes are reaching up the twisted steel poles to the sun, his cabbages, melons and squash are swelling into ripeness, and his greens are so abundant, he is giving them away (to the food pantry). With a used freezer donated by Outgrow Hunger, he and his wife Angela (who is diagnosed with fibromyalgia and has trouble walking) and their two children plan to process and freeze a lot of the food to eat through the winter, and donate the rest to other needy families in the community.
Already, Chad’s attitude has changed, he’s got some pride back, his whole family is eating healthier food, and the garden gets him outside moving and sweating every day, with his excited kids beside him. And that’s happening on 43 family gardens all across Ashe County.
Travis Birdsell taking gardens with Christy & Lowell Penley.
OutGrow Hunger is a movement sponsored by the churches of Ashe County that has partnered with Heifer in the Seeds of Change program in Appalachia– and believe me, these folks are on fire! This year, they aim to source Ashe County food pantries with 90,000 pounds of fresh produce from regional gardeners (“A Community of 100 Gardeners”) as well as from commercial growers. So instead of just getting 20 boxes of mac & cheese, people living on food assistance will also get fresh squash, cucumbers, tomatoes and melons. Travis, a local deacon and landscape horticulturist, routinely travels to new gardening families to share his knowledge and experience, and Rob, a UMC pastor and director of Ashe Outreach Ministries, oversees a food pantry that provides food to about 800 people a month, a community kitchen that feeds 65 folks daily, a meals-on-wheels program, and backpack buddies for 300 local school children. And this is just their FIRST year of operation!
Outgrow Hunger also has plans to put in a greenhouse so they can start seedlings for all their gardeners; plant orchards in every elementary school in Ashe county so every child will be able to pick a piece of fruit to eat; put in educational gardens on donated land so low-income people can learn to garden more effectively (Chad could teach this course!) and use money from Heifer to buy a flash freezer so they can make those pounds of produce into healthy soups & stews for the pantry.
Austin Penley, a good young gardener of Ashe County.
Outgrow Hunger is just one of the programs that Heifer is aligned with in Appalachia, but it’s among the most impressive – mostly due to the energy, commitment and non-stop vision of Travis and Rob, and Heifer’s own spark-plug, Jeffrey Scott. It’s a perfect example of the “Collective Impact” model that Heifer is using to bring 60 leaders in the community to the table to address the critical challenge of how to improve nutrition and economic growth in these traditional farming regions that have fallen on hard, hungry times. That requires the skills of many groups: nonprofits and advocacy, schools and universities, business people, corporations, health organizations, government and churches, working together to change things.
Travis & Jeffrey delivering a freezer: some days require brain power, some just plain brawn.
But what it’s all about in the end is seeing Chelsea Roberts, pulling me over excitedly to offer a snow pea, picked fresh off the vine. It is divine. She helped grow it, and she loves the taste of it.
“You cain’t get no fresher than that!” she says proudly. I gotta agree.
Bill has been unemployed for 2 years, sold his house in Florida at a loss, and now lives in tents with 5 family members.
I just got back from spending six rain-soaked days in Appalachia and the Arkansas Delta, viewing some of Heifer’s newest projects to reduce hunger and poverty here in America.It was a damp and eye-opening trip in which I got to meet some remarkable people, experience despair at the entrenched poverty I saw, and feel beams of hope in the creativity and passion of farmers, cheese-makers, biker pastors, entrepreneurs and dreamers in both regions.
Charles Church, organic farmer.
American poverty is the great silent shame of our time. At $15 trillion dollars a year, the American economy is the largest in the world, producing ¼ of the planet’s entire gross domestic product. Yet one in seven people in America live below the poverty line of $22, 113 for a family of four. A person working full-time at the minimum wage earns about $14,500 a year – and 80% of single mothers heading a household work at least one job and still can’t provide the basic necessities for their children.
The largest demographic of poor people are children – with 44% of American children living in low-income working families. About half of all American children will receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (food stamps) before the age of 20; for African-American children, that number is 90%. And the majority of all Americans will live in poverty at some point before reaching the age of 65.
Now that you’re in a coma of statistics and depression … let me tell you how beautiful Appalachia is. (I’ll get to the beautiful Delta later..)
I spent my first four days in Boone, North Carolina and the surrounding towns in far western North Carolina. Even in the relentless rain, the green of the fields and mountains, the tidy gardens of the small households, and the sweeping vistas you knew were huddled behind the dark clouds were glorious. But you can’t eat beauty. In Appalachia, the problem is not a lack of land but the lack of production of local food, organic produce, and provisions that are sought after and becoming ever more valuable in these tourist-driven communities. In the Delta, amidst huge agribusiness farms on endless swaths of land, the people have no acres to call their own, their local economy has dried up like the drought-stricken earth, and they are literally stranded in towns buffeted by crop dusters and blown past by anyone with wheels.
Poison raining down from above.
Somehow the land’s beauty in both places makes the hardscrabble lives of so many residents even harder to accept– along with the mining and manufacturing jobs that won’t be coming back, and the traditional ways of life evaporating like fog on the mountain. But Heifer and a bunch of other folks in these mountain and Delta communities are determined to draw a line in the sand and simply not allow that to happen.
Mast General provisions .. yummm!
I’ll be telling you their stories over the next two weeks. In the meantime, here’s Bob Dylan to take you back to those days when we swore we’d never let something like this happen here.
The first thing that strikes you about Romania is that it’s stunningly beautiful. The second is that like many beauties, it’s complicated and has a troubled past.
Caught for centuries between the possessive affections of Germany, Austria, Hungary and Russia, Romania spent 50 long post-war years in an abusive relationship under repressive and autocratic communist rule. From 1965 – 1989, dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s policies almost bankrupted the country and kept its people dependent and impoverished until it emerged blinking into the blaze of modern Europe a mere 20 years ago.
Oh, what they’ve seen — three beautiful farming women from Rasca.
Think about that. Virtually every Romanian over the age of 30 has a vivid memory of empty shelves, food rationing, security police “visiting” their homes at night, the collectivization of their land, and 22 hours a day of state television dedicated to poems about their fearless leader. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And nowhere is that more apparent than in Romania, where the majority of urbanites live in the loathed, butt-ugly Soviet bloc apartments that ring the outside of every city, even the lovely historic towns of Transylvania.
Enchanting old Cluj Napoca…
Meanwhile, the majority of rural people struggle to farm productively without a state Big Brother monitoring their every move. “We’ll pretend to work and they’ll pretend to pay us” was the ironic farming catch phrase under communism, yet under democratic rule, agricultural productivity dropped 90% in a decade. Unlearning communist stagnation seems to be harder than you might think.
Indeed, there are really two Romanias. A member of the EU community since 2007, Romania is a country of 19 million people: 50% living in sophisticated, developed urban areas and 50% living as subsistence farmers on land they just recently reclaimed from the state, clawing out a meager living on long, narrow plots of fertile land, driving horse-drawn carts, and herding their animals on communal pastures.
Gypsies (or Roma people) and Hungarians, shepherds and dairy farmers, the rural half of Romania seems centuries removed from the urban half– a fact that is both lovely and confounding.
Rural life in Romania is so challenging that millions of young people have moved to other EU countries, leaving older people behind to do the hard work of farming. It is in these rural areas that Heifer is working to improve nutrition and increase income through livestock projects and community development … and where I happily spent most of my time.
Now for the question that’s been on everyone’s mind: Yes, I did spend all my time in Transylvania. No, I did not see any vampires. And obviously, I will now be living for thousands of years in my own personal coffin.
I’m gonna live forever …in the Carpathians of Transylvania!
I challenged y’all to come up with some questions for me — about Cameroon or my idiosyncratic travel habits. And just like the champions you are, you didn’t disappoint. (Sorry if the answers are too long — I felt like this was my Dear Abby moment & I couldn’t help myself!)
Jeffrey/Genie: What are the toilet facilities like in each of the countries to which you have traveled?
Way to start things off, Jeffrey/Genie! Toilets have been pretty consistently “challenging”… meaning something you would never accept in America, but can’t complain about when that’s the way people there live every day. In China and Nepal, toilets were usually a hole in the ground with two “footsteps” on either side – even in the airport. You learn to always, always carry toilet paper with you, but not to flush it as the sewers can’t handle it. In Haiti, a nightclub I went to had the weirdest toilet ever – it was four feet down in a dark tiled room with water running continuously all over the floor. In the Andes, our toilet was a simple hole in the ground and the “walls” only came up to your waist, but you were overlooking this magnificent mountain range and beautiful fields. Hard to object to that! In Cameroon, we almost never went to the bathroom in the villages but it was so hot, I could go all day without one… a real first! The one time I did have to go by the side of the road, I was so flummoxed (I couldn’t hide anywhere and I was so afraid the people in the house 50 yards away would see me and be really insulted), I went really fast and ending up peeing all over my skirt. TMI???
Pattie: How are you changing, in even the tiniest of ways, and what is one thing you wish you knew years ago about yourself/about the world?
Acceptance is beautiful.
I am now very aware when I’m being demanding and obnoxious, which doesn’t sound like monumental progress but it totally is. Ask my husband. I wish I knew years ago, on a deep visceral level, that when all your plans go out the window, there is usually a reason for it, and it’ll all turn out not just okay, but better. In other words – be flexible and trust the process (which translates into – don’t flip out and get demanding and obnoxious). It’s a beautiful circuitous thing.
EarthSkyOceanRedux: How many of the 200+ languages in Cameroon have you heard? The signs in one photo you posted look like what they call Camfranglais!
I love the signs in every country … priceless!
I heard about 9-10 languages in Cameroon and in your photo I suppose it is Camfranglais, a completely unintelligible form of pidgin English they speak in the South. It’s a mish-mash of tribal language, English and French – so you think you know what you’re hearing and then get left totally in the dust (where I spend most my time).
Ember:I would like to know what you think the hardest part of your Heifer travels has been so far. battling bureaucracy for visas? being a food wimp? leaving people behind?
Every once in a while I get adventurous: this was delicious bitter vegetable soup!
Being a food wimp isn’t hard; it’s who I am. It is hard to always be leaving somebody behind… whether it’s my very patient husband or darling daughter, or the people in the villages that I can’t bear to think I’ll never see again.
The Tibet visa debacle in China got me pretty unhinged, but most trips go pretty smoothly, so I can’t say that’s too stressful. And sometimes I feel like I just can’t face another 18 hour plane ride – but then I do, and it’s fine. It’s the price of entry to all these amazing places…. Really, the hardest part is feeling like I’m not doing enough to promote the blog & repay Heifer’s investment in my travel, because that’s money that could have gone into programs. But trying to promote a blog is an endless quest, and there’s never enough you can do, so I have to just do my best and let it go.
Martha: What is something you didn’t pack early on, but wished you had, and now never forget? Also, what small thing have you brought as a gift for those special circumstances when you want to thank someone you’ve met on your travels?
I never forget Immodium (for obvious reasons). I first brought pens, candy and crayons for the kids, but as it turned out that’s not such a great idea and Heifer doesn’t support it, as it ends up singling out an individual or group for special treatment and that breeds resentment and envy. I have given money for Heifer staff to develop prints from the DVDs I burn so the people in the villages can have a photo of themselves…. very often their first. I love the idea of that!
Sharing my shots in Agingare village, Nepal with the Chepang family.
Deb: I look at the barren north and look forward to hearing what plan was made. The fertile area appears to be great for farming. Do they send excess produce north to help feed the starving? Another bigger question, why is the north most populated?
The indomitable Tapita Bamiya and 3 of her 9 children in the Far North.
The Far North is largely Islamic and has a tradition of polygamous families (about 60-80%) and those families always have more children. It was completely typical in my visit for women to have 7-9 children; it’s their culture and the farm communities need lots of hands to do the work. They grow cassava, maize, and cotton in the Far North but since the dry seasons are getting longer, those stored crops have to last a loooong time. Heifer is working with communities on creating better storage facilities, but as far as I know, there is very little transfer of food from South to North –basically because the people in the Far North have no income with which to buy the food. (The average income is $220/year– that’s what they mean by “subsistence.”)
Kathryn: I find the heat hard to bear. Especially when there is no AC or sometimes even electricity. In those cases, what have you done to stay cool? And one more–what kind of “tool kit” do you travel with–if any–i.e. flashlight, medicines, comfort foods, batteries? In other words, what do you travel with “just in case?”
Luckily, most of the places we stay have AC, even though it intermittently goes out and/or creates a huge racket (see the video above). My emergency rations include ibuprofen, cough drops, vitamins, Advil PM (essential when you’ve GOT to get some sleep and you’re in a weird place), little baggies of dark M&Ms for sweet attacks, and sometimes a bottle of bourbon or gin from duty-free “just in case” I need a cocktail at the end of a long day. And I always have my headlamp so I can read without depending on that scourge of humanity: the dim, horrid compact fluorescent light.
Susan: What’s the single strangest thing you’ve seen either in Cameroon or on the whole voyage – either of the edible, or allegedly edible, variety, or anything else that you were taken aback by?
The Cane Rats (I always thought they were saying “king rats”) that they raise, sell, and eat in Cameroon … and believe me, I will be telling you a lot more about them. Rodents are my single greatest fear, so seeing this project was the most courageous thing I’ve made myself do this year.
Denise: How do you address the enormous inequality that you witness?
Profile of malnutrition.
I try to bear witness to it and not to feel ashamed of my enormous privilege and abundance (because what good does that do anybody?) In the villages, I try really hard to communicate my respect, compassion and desire to understand their world and their circumstances – and my intention to take that knowledge back and share it with others. Sometimes the poverty is overwhelming and terribly difficult to see, but if the people living in it have faith and hope, how can I have anything less?
Kim: Do they have any semblance of states or nation over there working together to build a united area? Trade, monies, supplies, etc.?
I’m not sure if your question is about Africa or Cameroon, but there are many pan-African organizations that are working to try to develop strategies to combat desertification, deforestation, climate change, hunger and poverty … but as you know, there is a lot of tension and conflict between African nations (like Western ones) and it’s not easy to work together, particularly when resources are so very limited.
Meredith: My question is; you are being well received, but how welcome are ‘foreign’ ideas in these various countries? Part of the cause of the poverty that ‘requires’ Heifer to be active is due to foreign interference, isn’t it? I am most certainly not downing the Heifer programs, which seem to be very tailored to the local needs, just wonder if eventually Heifer sees itself ‘out of a job’?
A local Groupe d’Initiative Commune (GIC) from Melong, Cameroon, organized since 2001.
You are totally right, Meredith, the legacy of colonialism and rapacious foreign companies are irrefutably part of the cause of global poverty. Yet most developing countries realize full well they need help and are eager for it; the problem is one of hierarchy and process. One of the beautiful things about Heifer is that it’s not a top-down organization but always works with organized local communities – and its programs come out of needs those communities expressly request. Even the animals given are not delegated; the communities themselves decide what livestock they want to raise. Also, Heifer staff around the world is about 98% native to the country – and the programs are further localized and run in collaboration with neighborhood groups (which in Cameroon mean the local tribes) and government offices. In truth, the biggest drawback Heifer faces is that while some NGOs give away everything (and then leave), Heifer requires people to participate in their own development, and that is a much higher bar. But of course, the ultimate dream for an anti-poverty organization is to put itself out of a job… we should be so lucky!
Emile: I am Cameroonian, and as you know the country has been poorly managed by the politicians, so what can the local people do to improve their lot? Heifer and KIVA are good initiatives and God knows we need all the help we can get but there must be something local that can be improved upon to alleviate poverty.
Whenever I think about the kids in Cameroon, I hope and pray like crazy that things will change faster so they’ll have a chance for a better future. Heifer’s programs in Cameroon (and everywhere) are very much on the local level, but there’s a new focus on scaling up, coordinating programs and creating cooperatives that will have a bigger impact. If we could double the productivity of the 678 million smallholder farmers around the world, they could feed the world.. and that is certainly Heifer’s goal. I hope you are inspired by the stories of the programs, coming right up!
Brenda: I’m a big believer that educating girls and helping women have productive employment is a key to ending poverty. Where have you seen significant efforts being made to engage women and girls as equal stakeholders and conversely, where does more focus need to be put on women’s involvement?
Women’s meeting, Mordok, Cameroon
Brenda, Heifer always focuses on women’s empowerment (many programs are 90% women) — because that’s the fastest way to lift a community, and women and children are the most vulnerable economically. In Nepal and Peru, I was particularly struck by the dynamic attitude of the women and how hard they were working for change. I’m always kind of horrified by the size of families in poor areas because it puts so much more pressure on the families’ resources, but statistics do show that the minute girls are educated and given opportunity, birth rates plummet…so the answer is to give the families the financial means to educate girls and in a generation, everything can change. Also, Heifer’s Gender Equality trainings (part of every project) are really transformative in getting men to share decision-making and work with their wives — and that’s a giant leap forward for womankind.
Sybil: What are the effects of climate change in Cameroon?
Queue for the water borehole at Barza Village in the Far North, Cameroon.
Just in case this picture doesn’t say a thousand words, I’ll be writing about beautiful, beleaguered Barza next week — it’s ground zero in climate change.
REALLY APPRECIATE YOUR QUESTIONS .. LET’S DO THIS AGAIN SOMETIME!
If you are horrified by discrimination in America (or wherever you live), the caste system in Nepal will drive you mental. As in many Hindu countries, Nepal has centuries of history where the caste you were born into not only determined your social position but also your rights, your profession, whom you could marry, and where you could live.
Neither does he…
The lower castes couldn’t enter the temple, the homes of the upper caste, use the same water tap, or even make eye-contact with a high-caste person. Even though new laws prohibit this kind of discrimination, culture and hundreds of years of history often overrides that.
Which is what makes a project like Heifer’s in Agingare village in Chitwan feel so monumental. The Chepang people living here are jungle dwellers who were forced from the forest last generation by the Conservation Act, and they are considered an untouchable caste. They are small people and very beautiful, reminding me of Cambodians or the Hmong, yet with no experience in farming, raising animals or living in houses, they struggled to survive outside the jungle, and were shunned by nearby villages and isolated in ignorance.
Nor does she ….
The cheerful Rajinama…
But Rajinama Chepang, his wife Shreemaya and 7 children pretty much repudiate every prejudice commonly held about the Chepang people. Thought to be “carefree and careless,” they steadfastly worked their way through the Heifer teachings and passed on the gift of animals to other needy families in a rapid 18 months.
…and Shreemaya, mother of 7??!
Considered by other villagers to be dirty and slovenly, these Chepangs keep their farm neat as a pin (is a pin neat??). And though Chepang people were never thought to be good with livestock, Raji and Shreemaya’s 18 goats, 10 chickens, 3 cows, and 4 oxen look in the pink of health – and their children are polite and adorable– and all in school. Most impressive, they’ve shared the trainings of keeping a Healthy Household and good animal husbandry with other Chepang families, uplifting the whole community.
The tidy homestead (look at the woodstacks!) of Raji & Shreemaya Chepang.
Shiva Lal Chepang, teacher extraordinaire.
The Chepang people in Agingare were led in the Heifer project by Shiva Lal Chepang, the only caste member in the village to have any education at all. He’d only gone through 5thgrade (which would normally not qualify him to teach), but Heifer made him a teacher, trained him and paid him to teach literacy and the 12 Cornerstones to his neighbors.
Now he is the President of the Chepang group and has steered them into a 373-member co-op with neighboring villages that has built a Goat Collection Center to aggregate goats for sale directly to wholesalers (doubling their income), and a Vegetable Collection Center to do the same. The Chepangs are also part of the area’s Forest Users Group, with one member of each family volunteering with other villages to guard the forest from illegal logging, poaching and slash & burn agriculture. In short, they’ve become part of the community that once shunned them.
The beautiful family of Rajinama & Shreemaya Chepang (a few other kids sneaked in!)
The Chepang people in Agingare have not only proven their competency, they’ve given animals to nearby villages of a higher caste, further breaking down barriers of prejudice and separation. In fact, the Heifer implementer of the Agingare project is Sunita Regmi, from the highest Brahmin caste – and she is as proud of the Chepangs’ progress as a parent.
Sunita & the co-op’s new collection centers for goats & vegetables.
When Chad Roberts lost his job two years ago, he never dreamed he’d be unemployed this long. 
He was a machinist, forklift operator, and could drive just about anything. But living in Ashe County, North Carolina where unemployment has hovered between 12%- 15% and three major manufacturers have been shuttered, Chad’s job opportunities were few and far between. Nobody called him back on his job applications, and nobody seemed to be hiring.
Heifer 12 x 12 