I am working on a Koins newsletter, and asked for help explaining what SRA is all about. I received a wonderful explanation from Joel Black, board member of SRA and Director of Curriculum. His response is too long to fully include in our newsletter, but I wanted to share it. SRA is truly an inspired organization, and I look forward to seeing the fruits of our partnership in Kenya.
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Ingrid:
I am delighted to respond. I understand you have the SRA brochure, and I can also send the entire business plan, if that will help. But as a new, and part-time member of the organization, maybe your people will find interesting what attracted me.
For years I watched with interest the efforts of the Benson Institute, (then at BYU) to help the most remote and needy peoples of the world grow sufficient crops to healthily feed their families. Each new discovery, like how to grow tomatoes at altitude in the cold, or how to build a family business with chickens, tickled me no end. Each story of children now able to play, be educated, and grow up with hope, brought a tear to my eye. And then I met a donor to the program, who told me of wells, schools, greenhouses and farm plots, and of whole villages turning out to treat him as royalty for his simple kindnesses in helping them help themselves. It was the essence of charity, of goodwill, of what I consider to be Christianity.
The Institute for Self-Reliant Agriculture has taken up this banner, and in cooperation with other charities, and (most amazingly to me) hand in hand with National Governments across the third world, is carrying this hope to hundreds (and soon, thousands) more families. Kenya is next.
It is a story of an endless stream of miracles how the donors, the beneficiaries, the charities, the contacts, the professional personnel, and the key links between all of them have turned up on airplanes, on street corners, in friends’ living rooms, eager to lend a hand. One of these, a former Benson Institute Director, and the Head of the B.Y.U. Nutrition Department, Dr. Paul Johnston, who also reviews nutritional issues as a board member of SRA, sent me the following:
With my students we are analyzing the presence of malnutrition among the school children serviced by Koins of Kenya. We are doing so by anthropometric measurements (height, weight and age) of the children as compared to world standards as established by the World Health Organization. We are also examining the children’s diets for deficiencies of individual nutrients. Our objective is to suggest a possible nutrition program through crops, gardens and/or animal rearing that will provide foods to correct the nutritive deficiencies.
Paul
It is another of these serendipitous events that brought Koins and SRA to one another’s awareness. SRA was in Malawi, with some tentative connections to Ghana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and heartfelt desires to find a way to reach all of Africa, when Koins appeared. Truly our heads are spinning. Health requires clean water and vaccinations. Education requires schools and teachers. Farms require seeds and know-how and water. Small scale agriculture can provide a key, a foundation, but there is much more that deprived communities need. From where we stand, Koins descended like Manna. We first asked, “What is it?” just like the Israelites of old. And then, like them again, we jumped all over it.
The mission of SRA is simple and unique. Simply help provide the skills and knowledge to the neediest of parents, so that they are able to, and will, provide for their children—to help families become self-reliant, in nutrition and health, in education and economics, in life. To that end we partner with university professors in America for the latest research in agronomy, nutrition and animal science, with university personnel in the local countries for ongoing teaching and support to the families, with benefactors from many walks of life, and with like-minded charities, in order to reach as many indigent farmers as possible, as quickly as possible. SRA freely shares its curriculum, willingly cooperates with partner NGOs, and quickly steps into the background so that others may have the credit. What makes us unique, however, is not the foregoing; it is that no other charity has the 5-year, supported, Small Scale Agricultural Model that produces a self-perpetuating, independent community, which, itself, then sows another.
What does a partnership with Koins mean to SRA? Good friends, a shared mission. That isn’t really the question. It is what does a Koins/SRA partnership mean to Kenya? It means dozens (this year) and hundreds (next year) and thousands (eventually) of our fellowmen in Kenya eating well, living longer in the association and love of their families; children gaining the education and skills to break the cycle of poverty, holding responsible positions, lifting entire communities to a place where they can participate in the economy, governance, and care of their nations. You might say we believe in handing out the privileges and opportunities we have, particularly freedom—in helping others find it, live it, share it.
Joel D. Black, Ph.D
Assistant Director, Director of Curriculum
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In June, there will be an SRA group going to Kenya, and the agricultural training will begin. The Kenyans in our villages grow corn as their main crop. It is what they eat every day. It is not the most nutritious option, nor the best use of land and resources, in what it provides in return. However, it is tradition, it is what they know. Our desire, as we work with SRA, is to teach them a different, and a better way to plant and grow crops, to utilize their land and resources to provide them a more abundant and nutritious variety of food, so that they go from subsisting on the land, to growing an abundance, more than they need to survive, so they can have food in storage when times are lean, and then move on to selling their excess for a profit. We are very excited to partner with SRA, and know the future will be brighter for our villagers with their help.
There are start up costs, in the training and providing of materials to the families SRA will be teaching. It will cost approximately $300 per Kenyan family to fully train and create a self reliant family farm. If you would like to contribute, you can do so on our secure website or through our PayPal account. As with all our programs, 100% of your contribution will go directly to the programs in Kenya. Note that your donation is for our SRA program when you make your donation.
Asante sana!
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