Cannock and Stafford Soroptimists and their guests were delighted on 9th October to welcome Patricia Gatherum to celebrate their International Evening. Patricia had travelled from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to be with them. She is the coordinator for the project that Soroptimist International of Great Britain and Ireland (SIGBI) have been supporting for the last three years in the Meru district of Kenya and had recently returned from a study tour, so was able to tell everyone at firsthand how the project was progressing.
Working with the charity child.org and a local charity called CIFORD the project set out to provide seeds, tools and encouragement to enable women in that impoverished rural area of Kenya to create gardens to support themselves and their families and to provide surplus food to sell in their local market. Forty highly motivated women were chosen to undertake the gardening. They were also encouraged to harvest seeds to enable the project to be self-sustaining.
This has been very successful and recently the project has expanded. Women have been taught how to use energy efficient stoves to reduce the number of trees being cut down and forty water tanks have been provided to collect as much precious water as possible. Women collect water from the tanks in a morning, boil it and then allow it to cool so they now have safe drinking water and surplus water can be used to irrigate the gardens.
What began as nutritional training has now been expanded to also provide advice to prevent girls being drawn into forced marriage, female genital mutilation and to encourage AIDS prevention. It is hoped to expand this very shortly to run a similar course for boys in the villages. Two motor bikes have been purchased to allow aid workers to travel to more of the outlying villages.
Soroptimist International of Great Britain and Ireland has so far raised over £127,000 for this work and the project has been extended until October next year. It is hoped that the sum raised by then will easily exceed the original £150,000 which SIGBI had hoped to raise and there will therefore be enough money to provide at least one well so the villages are not entirely reliant on rain water.
At the end of a fascinating talk President June was delighted to be able to present Patricia with a cheque for £500 which Cannock Soroptimists raised from their Open Gardens weekend in the summer.
Photo attached: l to r: Cannock Soroptimist Maggie Shore; Stafford Soroptimist Ann Dawson, June Bould, President, SI Cannock; speaker, Soroptimist Patricia Gatherum