Living in a region like Kamuwongo, Kenya where little rain falls and temperatures are high, can be challenging. The staff and Franciscan Clarist Sisters, who run Chalice’s Mercy Care sponsor site, work to support the families, who mainly rely on farms for their food and income.
“Due to the dry climate orchestrated by low rainfall and high temperatures in our catchment area, most of the families from the community are vulnerable to hunger, malnutrition, and high prevalence of diseases,” says Sister Sherly, Mercy Care site director.
Multiple factors impact these ongoing food shortages; the big ones are droughts, floods, food price hikes, crop failures, and livestock diseases.
Thanks to the generosity of Chalice’s Lunch Buddies, who contribute monthly to the Ladles and Love campaign, the Mercy Care team has been able to partner with Chalice to launch a sustainable, multi-layered nutrition program.
The program has four components:
School Lunch Program
The Mercy Care’s nutrition program has a daily lunch program in eight schools. Since the program was launched, the Mercy Care team has delivered thousands of kilograms of beans to the eight schools for their daily hot lunch of stew.
“The school feeding program is a vital food security measure with a positive impact in reducing hunger and increasing nutrition levels among 1,229 school going children in the eight schools we’ve supported,” says Sr. Sherly. They are also planting vegetable gardens and fruit trees at the schools, creating a sustainable food supply for years to come.
“Through the school feeding program, we have increased the happiness of learners [and] enhanced school retention by 100%,” Sr. Sherly says. They’ve also seen enrolment jump by 113 students. “Concentration in class has improved with 100% school attendance and 100% transition to the next levels.”
Nutrition support for families
Mercy Care provides nutrition support for forty families. These families are composed of eight families living with chronic illness, thirty acutely food-insecure families, and two child-headed families. For the forty acutely food insecure families, the site delivered maize, beans and cooking oil to prepare daily meals.
“This support enabled the families to have at least two meals each day,” Sr. Sherly says. “The families with young children, elderly and sickly, were provided with a porridge in the morning.”
School garden and agriculture collaboration
They set up 26 multistory vegetable gardens in all eight participating schools, and papaya fruit trees in four. “The multistorey gardens supplies vegetables to the school kitchen to ensure children are provided with nutritious meals while in school.”
The gardens and papaya groves supplement the daily stew with fresh produce, which can otherwise be prohibitively expensive to feed all at once.
Kitchen Garden and livestock
The agricultural program also extended to the family homes. Through the garden initiative, Mercy Care staff “introduced families and schools to new techniques of kitchen gardening, and rearing goats to ensure families access vegetables and goat milk to fight hunger.”
With more diversity in their toolbox, the parents have more options for making a living, which in turn increases their food security. Sr. Sherly sees the new knowledge “creating resilience among households as they do not solely depend on rain-fed agriculture to sustain themselves.”
“Thank you for your endless support for us,” says Ruth, a mother whose family has benefitted from the program. “My children have continued an undisrupted education because of the school feeding program. “Indeed, we are able to survive the harsh economic times because of the food supplies we get from you.”
“You have helped us to reduce hunger and improve nutrition, and this has ultimately led to increased enrollments, enhanced educational outcomes and lower dropout rates,” says Sr. Sherly. “They are happy to go to school to learn.”
Your monthly support as a Lunch Buddy means more than meals, it means hope, health, and a brighter tomorrow for entire communities. Become a Lunch Buddy and help fight hunger!