Provide Vegetable Gardens for Families in Brazil

UPDATE AUGUST 2010

Dear donors and project friends,

first of all I want to apologize for leaving you such a long time without a project report but here goes a new one and you will see through this one, that project "Provide Vegetable Gardens for Families in Brazil", is advancing not as fast as we would like, but it is making important progress in our communities. We still have difficulties to find families that want and need a donation of a home vegetable garden. One of the reasons is that people are leaving the country, abandoning their backyards and preferring to buy at the supermarkets. The partnership with Valença County municipality to implement vegetable gardens in the municipal schools stopped because the local Mayor was obliged to leave his office for political and legal reasons. We will have new elections in two months. Then we have to start it all over again. This was the bad part, but the good part is that, at last, an old greenhouse we showed in a picture two reports ago, saying that that we would help reconstruct because it was important for the production of good quality organic sprouts of different vegetables and that we had bought twenty 3 meters concrete poles and 10 crossbars, is ready, beautiful and operating. They have already doubled their production of sprouts that is supplied to other members of the Organic Producers Association as well as the community in general. You will see a sequence of photos of the rebuilding of the greenhouse, from the old one to the placement of the baby vegetables on the market. We continue to look for home vegetable gardeners and recently our team made a presentation to a group of small producers of an association kept by local church. We still do not have any return from them. You will see also some pictures of this meeting. Last month the project sponsored 5 people to attend to an organic agriculture course, the same course we offered in other occasions and that you can see in other earlier updates. We have no photos. We have a new small producer to help as we are going to build a new greenhouse for him. Mr. Antonio dos Santos wants to improve his old one and to start a new small business producing different kinds of saplings of trees, fruit trees, palm trees, spices, flowers and garden plants. Attached you will see two pictures of Antonio and his existing greenhouse. In the next update we will have a new greenhouse to show you. I am sure that these small investments in agricultural models that preserve nature and water and that can be reproduced everywhere, may represent the beginning of economical, social and environmental changes in the living of many Third World citizens. Thank you very much for your help and donations. They make all this possible and I am very grateful to you. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, ideas or suggestions and who knows some day some of you can come visit us?

Thank you again for this support,

Roberto.