World Inc.

Eight beautiful young girls with names like Princess and Victoria, and one caregiver named Mother Ruth. These are the ladies that make up “Women’s Organized Resources for Liberian Development”, otherwise known as World Inc. Mother Ruth provides nutritious meals, a loving home, discipline, and a solid education for these young women who would have otherwise have been struggling to survive.

This is the location of our latest agriculture program where we have just started preparing garden beds. First we staked out the area for the beds and then began digging out rocks, glass, plastic and old batteries from the soil – evidence of previous dump piles and misuse of the land during the war. Now we are beginning to add organic material back into the soil including banana leaves, fruit and vegetable scraps, egg shells, fish remains, manure, and even malt from the local brewery. All of these ingredients are adding nutrients back into the soil to provide a fertile area for planting our gardens.

At the same time, we made nursery boxes where we add soil which has been sifted to remove rocks in preparation for planting seeds. So far, we have planted eggplant, peppers, cabbage, okra and a few others. Mother Ruth admits that she knows little about agriculture so she has been eager to learn. Every day she takes notes on each step of the process and is avidly reading the literature I have provided for her. She has also started teaching the girls how to care for the land that God has provided for them and often they help in small ways around the garden. Each evening the girls go out together and water their young plants. Gardening definitely takes time, energy, and sweat, as well as planning and commitment! These are lessons we are all learning together. I’m excited to see the restoration of this piece of land, how these gardens will provide food for the girls at World Inc. for years to come, and the values these young women will learn from God's beautiful creation!

A Farm in Virginia

Early in the 1800s, freed slaves from the US were given the opportunity to return to Africa, the home of their ancestors. Most of those freed slaves were transported to Liberia where they built their own homes and started farms or plantations. Often they named the new area after the place they lived in the States. In Liberia, you can find names like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Virginia. Last week I visited a farm in Virginia owned by a church who sponsors an orphanage called Victorious Faith.

When orphanages are located in the city of Monrovia they often do not have space for a farm, so they purchase land elsewhere and transport the produce into the city to either eat or sell in the market. This plot of land provides food for the children of Victorious Faith and is run single-handedly by a young man named Moses. So far they have grown cassava, cabbage, sweet potatoes, peppers (see photo), and bitterball. But he is fighting an uphill battle.

The difficulty for Moses is that he must walk a long way to find water in a nearby swamp so he can water the garden. His farm is in need of a well or during the upcoming dry season the crops will not survive. As well, during the night thieves often come to steal the crops because Moses lives a mile or two away. He would like to move to the farm to watch over it and protect the land but he is in need of a small house. Even when his crops succeed, they are sometimes destroyed by caterpillars, grasshoppers, and other insects. The produce that is grown on the farm will help feed the children at Victoria's Faith, and we would like to assist Moses in his efforts to provide for those children. If you would like to contribute to the the various Agriculture projects that ORR is involved with, please indicate that your donation is for Capacity Building. Thank you for helping to feed the children!