Today's pic we received yesterday from a community in rural Mambwe. It is easy for me to choose the most recent pic we have received from our leaders in Zambia, because they are most often pics of our brothers and sisters there receiving a monthly allocation of maize. And that is what we are about. And that is what our HARVEST acquisition effort is about. That picture is from one of the church communities where they have had maize stored since last harvest. That was actually a very late effort to distribute their April allocations, so they have two more months of shelled maize still stored and then the bags will be gone. But the people will still be struggling.
We have very high hopes this year that the training initiated a year ago by our friends at ZIAP and then continued this year by many of last year's trainees will begin to make a difference even as soon as this coming harvest. Ā But it will just be a beginning.
In fact, our intention is to begin our harvest acquisition directly from the 400+ trainees for whom we provided some help with seed and fertilizer at the beginning of the growing season. We will be issuing the following instructions:
1) The first 2 bags come back to the storehouse in a "thank you" gesture for the inputs received.
2) Assuming they had the best yield ever, which really should be the case, the next few bags (at least 3, which is exactly what that family would otherwise have received from S2S during the coming year) should be KEPT and used for the family. There is no way of knowing if this will be enough to truly get them started on a road to self-sufficiency, but we think they should make the attempt anyways. That will then free the community leadership to continue to compare their situation with that of others in the community when the monthly distribution is made over the coming months.
3) Then whatever is left we hope to have the funds to acquire from them at a price slightly higher than the price set by the government for their own acquisition program. In this way we bless them one more time and we acquire as much maize as possible for the community stores.
Assuming my estimates of their yields are close, the $86,000 we now have in hand and ready for the harvest acquisition would ALMOST purchase everything these 400+ growers will be selling. That's the good news. The bad news is this would only be enough for around 1,700 households to be impacted over the subsequent 12 months. That would be a significant reduction in the monthly impact from harvest compared to what we have been doing the last 12 months.
As we continue to receive funds directed at the harvest, we will expand our acquisition targets as follows:
1) Even though we only provided inputs to 400+ of the neediest growers who were trained, there were THOUSANDS trained! When we run out of maize to buy from those that received inputs, we will first turn our gaze towards the others who were trained in the areas where we still want to fill a quota set purposely to share with the church communities in that area.
2) We trained growers in 89 of the churches in our current distribution system. There are many church communities that were just far enough from the training sessions that they missed out. Those communities will likely have some maize to sell us as well, and we will next look to growers in those communities to offer maize for us to acquire for them to store and distribute over the coming 12 months.
3) One of the biggest questions currently facing us is whether we will expand our distribution system this year. We have several churches currently on a wait list to join the program. All filled with vulnerable members who are still using old farming methods and struggling to feed their families. How much we are able to allocate to this process will ultimately determine if some of those are able to join us moving forward.
Last week IĀ reported having $70,000 on hand with an expectation of another $15,000 committed. As IĀ mentioned above, we finished April having collected just over $86,000. We have one more "check in the mail" that should arrive shortly, and that may well get us to the level needed to acquire everything grown by the trainees that received inputs. That would be a terrific accomplishment - especially for those 400+ families. But if we stop there, our monthly impact will shrink for the first time since this rhythm of development leading to relief work started five years ago at harvest when we purchased our first $23,000 worth of maize at harvest and used it to increase our monthly impact from 700+ families a month to just under 1,200 families. During this most recent distribution cycle we have been impacting over 3,000 families a month - in a country where there are as many as 4-5 MILLION struggling with food insecurity. We really don't want to shrink.
And so, we wait.
We pray.
We reach out in this blog and personally to those around us who may want to be involved.
Thanks so much to the 15 American families that have contributed this year and gotten us to the level reported above. It is amazing that a little surplus from 15 families can impact thousands of families in Zambia in truly life changing ways. We can do more. Thanks for considering whether you have some surplus that could be allocated to make a difference in this way.
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