“Homegrown Health”

 

     In fifteen years, the two youngest of Ms. Abla Mahmoud HuseinYasin’s five children may not remember the windfall which recently punctuated their childhood.  Abla can only hope.  No mother wishes flashbacks of severe hardship upon their children.  Rather, in all likelihood, they will only recall a childhood of plentiful harvest.

           

    Following the loss of their father to cancer, life at home appeared bleak for Abla’s children.  They contended daily with rations of water and sustenance.  A winding, rocky approach leading up to their isolated, hillside home made water deliveries costly and treacherous.  Abla was often faced with the wrenching decision of giving the last of the home’s water supply to either her children or their desiccated staple crops.  “Should we go thirsty today or hungry tomorrow,” is a question she no longer has to answer. 

           

    Thanks to an ACDI/VOCA funded “Assisting in Food Security in Six Villages in the Jenin District” project, the family of six is now a proud owner of an enterprising garden; one which has quickly buried their previous days of malnourishment.  They now have better things to worry about.   The crops produced in their backyard far surpass what the family alone can consume.  Somehow, they must be transported to the local markets.  A very resourceful family, they will undoubtedly find a way to ensure their surplus reaches the vendors below, in hopes of generating income for other basic needs. 

          

     When MA’AN Development Center, the project’s enabling organization, identified Abla’s family as a candidate for a cistern and irrigation network, they were met with more than gratitude.  The family had the idea of adding a sweat equity component to the undertaking.   A labor force comprised of themselves and a cast of supportive relatives matched the labor of hired workers in digging, terracing, and hauling soil to the garden. The five kids worked tirelessly as they pitched their hands throughout the entire process.  While the children teamed up, their mother attended the project’s home gardening training course, to verse herself in organic cultivation methods. 

      

     Family meals are now accompanied by wide eyed children forced to choose amongst almonds, peaches, grapes, figs, apples and citrus fruit, all pulled down from  trees in their own their backyard.  In truth, these are only appetizers.  The main course is an introduction to all sorts of new plants; onions, mulkhia, parsley, radish, spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers, pepper, eggplants, zucchini, watermelons, and beans.  Much of what remains is prepared into tomato paste, tomato juice, pickles, and dried mulkhia and zatar for sale in nearby villages.  

      

     Abla’s organic home garden will hopefully be a gateway project for Abu Deif and other nearby villages.  Not only has it given financial stability and ownership to a family in need, its highly effective irrigation network of gathering rainfall from the roof has employed the services of ten unemployed community members.   However, the marvel of this water collection system will soon be obstructed by foliage of towering trees in the Abla orchard; a growth only to be rivaled by five healthy children.