By Charlotte Farin, PhD | President and Founder
Dear Friend of the Haiti Goat Project,
Greetings! First of all, I would like to thank you again for supporting the Haiti Goat Project as we work to improve child nutrition and promote local agricultural development in Haiti.
Since our last report we have been working on activities associated with both our Farm-to-Fork and Genetic Improvement of Goats programs.
In our Farm-to-Fork program, we are in the process of obtaining an additional gas cooktop with 6 more burners so that we can increase our number of meals served per week from 675 to 850 in anticipation of the successful completion of our current fundraising campaign. Our on-site team wanted to modify their plan and have chosen to continue to focus solely on the 3 rural schools with children in most need of help. Once the school year begins, we plan to be serving a total of 850 meals per week to students in each of these 3 target schools (JeanJean, Ticousin, Tiboukan). Children need protein and other high-quality nutrients a minimum of 3 times per week to maintain their health. Because of the US travel ban that was in place from February to July of this year, many Haitian communities are hurting because the ban essentially eliminated a major revenue source: tourism. As a result, school lunch programs at these schools had to be discontinued, leaving the weekly Chili Kabrit meals as the only source of school lunches for these children. Families in JeanJean, Ticousin and Tiboukan were hit hard and our team felt that they were the most at-risk of all whom they work with. Therefore, the team voted to provide Chili Kabrit meals during the upcoming year to these schools every Wednesday as they had been doing, and then, on a rotating basis, provide each school with a second meal on Friday, totaling 3,400 meals per month. This will directly impact these children but will also impact many in the community because it means that every month of the 10-month school year, a total of 24 goats will be purchased from goat farmers in the area and tens of pounds of tomatoes, onions, eggplant, carrots, spinach and other vegetables will be purchased from vegetable farmers in order to prepare the Chili Kabrit for the school children. What a broad impact your support will have!
In our Genetic Improvement of Goats program, the 2019 goat kids born in March continue to grow and we have some really fine replacement bucks and does for our herd. All of the males from our 2018 kid crop have now been sold to surrounding communities to help improve their goat stock. In addition, we’ve begun preparations for the 2019-2020 breeding-kidding season. For this effort we had the opportunity to work with students from the Christianville Vocational and Technical School (CVET). We did a two-day training session with the students and gave them lots of hands-on experience as we processed the goat herd. Students learned how to give injections, provide oral deworming treatments, estimate body weight and age, and trim feet. Check out some pictures of our 2018 kid goats on pasture and also some of the CVET students working on animal preparation.
Once again, thank you so much for your continued interest and willingness to support this project. It is absolutely making a real difference in the lives of many children and families in Haiti.
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