By Sorrah Edwards-Thro | Grants Manager
Over 1,000 people - students, teachers, directors, and community members - benefited from the Institute technicians’ expertise across this year’s 18 trainee schools. Overall, schools are starting to see their gardens as an important source of income in an education system that rarely receives state funding. One teacher told us, “MCLC taught us techniques for how to grow vegetable gardens successfully. In addition to planting at school with my students, I started my own garden at home and was very successful.” Schools report that their gardens were able to bring in between $50 and almost $150 during their first growing seasons - the equivalent of almost half a year’s income in rural Haiti.
When you hear the word “technician”, what comes to mind? Maybe not leaves and dirt - but MCLC’s Institute of Learning calls the agricultural staff it sends out to trainee schools “technicians'' in recognition of the highly-detailed, problem-solving skills that their work with the gardens calls for. Technicians know how to look at the gardens as a system to maintain and tweak. When school plots were under attack by cricket-like insects, they taught schools how to prepare a natural insecticide using soap, African bird’s eye peppers, and neem. They have been experimenting with introducing new plant varieties that are not typically grown in La Gonave, including potatoes and garlic. Lately they’ve been raving about chives, explaining, “it keeps bugs away and doesn’t require much water”.
MCLC Institute staff are at work preparing a training curriculum to use with 20 new trainees during the upcoming school year, including additional units that are specific to best practices for school gardens. As Haiti navigates an uncertain time in the wake of its president’s assassination, we are appreciating the small, meaningful progress of a seed unfurling into a plant - and the vision of local self-sufficiency that these plants represent for the island of La Gonave and its school system. We have raised $8593 of our $50,000 goal. Help us keep this project moving by making a donation today. Together, we can reach all 200+ schools on La Gonave.
By Sorrah Edwards-Thro | Grants Manager
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