Life springs from the sand

Posted by Janet Lenz

If you participated in the 5 Day Hunger Challenge and experienced what it is like to live on beans or rice, flour, sugar and oil, it’s not difficult to understand what a thrill it is to be able to add fresh vegetables and herbs to your bland, simple diet.

The Saharawi people with whom CTR has been involved since 1999 have lived on that simple refugee diet for over 30 years. And God has put it into our hearts to help families in the refugee camps to grow simple vegetable gardens in the desert sands surrounding their tent homes.

The family gardens project continues to excite us as we see the potential for Saharawi families living in refugee camps in Algeria to provide healthy nutrition for themselves.

Through the generous gifts of people from CTR, we are pursuing the plan to choose families, provide training on growing gardens and offer the materials needed for each family. The camp of Auserd is the one we will focus most of our efforts on, as it is the poorest camp, usually by-passed for projects that could help the families there.

Under the advisement and guidance of a highly trained Saharawi agriculturalist, we will be providing gardens that will include drip irrigation supplies and training, a water container for each family, and techniques and seeds for growing carrots, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, zucchini, eggplant, and beets.

At our English Center, we will also be establishing gardens not only to benefit our Saharawi staff and neighbors, but also as a model that shows our support of this new venture to the Saharawi of Smara and to all the foreign visitors who pass through our gate. Because of all the available land around our school, and at the request of the Governor of Smara, we will also be planting trees that can survive the desert conditions (see Isaiah 41‚s list of these trees.)

For a people who are historically nomadic, always moving with their herds to find pasture and never staying in one place long enough to even imagine planting a garden, this is a very new concept. But those who have tried this new experiment are delighted to eat and share the vegetables (and sometimes even flowers) with their families and neighbors. This skill will be something they can take with them wherever they go….hopefully back to their homeland someday.