Urban farms empower Africa
Aid providers in Congo and elsewhere are discovering that lessons in farming can succeed where food handouts have not.
from the May 9, 2007 edition
Page 4 of 4
Lipepele and her husband took the vacant land next to their one-room home and planted sweet potatoes, which have highly nutritious leaves. Following the Mama Bongisa advice, they mounded the earth to get as much surface area as possible and to prevent Kinshasa's harsh rains from flooding the beds.
Soon they had enough crops to improve their diet; and after that they were able to sell the excess to buy caterpillars, fish, and other proteins.
Today, Lipepele has 24 planting beds – seven by her home and 17 between two rows of shacks a mile or so away. She is teaching some of her neighbors to farm.
"That woman who lives there, she just started gardening, too." Lipepele says, pointing across the dirt courtyard. She gives a quick grin. "She wanted to be like us."
She looks at the patches of raised earth, enriched with ground-up corncobs and select trash, and then gestures at her daughter, Jemima, who is now 8 years old and poised in a navy-and-white school uniform.
"Look at her," Lipepele says, smiling. "She's skinny, but she's nothing like she used to be. We are never hungry now."
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