The momentum continues...growing the post pam project for Vanuatu.

  We are now actively working with 6 schools with a total school enrollment of almost 6000 students!!!!

Each school garden programme develops at a different pace, but with 4 school vegetable gardens and 2 more in the planning and digging stages its is still very exciting to see how it all grows. The photo montage will show you how things have progressed...

We have also had a few very pleasant surprises recently - we were fortunate to have had some Duke of Edinburgh Award volunteers come and assist the Year 7 Agriculture Class at Freshwota School to prepare their garden patch and the first school we started working with has been growing more varieties of vegetables and developing additional school vegetable gardens.

Furthermore, we are in discussion with an INGO to develop a nutrition training programme to roll out into the schools that we are working with - that is another exciting development that we never intended when we started out on this amazing project....hope to have some pics next post.

Vila East School, from this......

...to this...
It's the same garden 2 months later!
Some of the veges have already been harvested
and used in the school canteen.
The school has replenished with new seedlings!
Awesome!

...and these fantastic little bean babies!!!!
The Vila East students made seed raising pods using toilet rolls
 that are now growing beans in the school garden.

Vila Central School Year 8 Agricultural Class getting stuck into planting out the seedlings in their garden. Its the biggest garden so far with approximately 200 seedlings and 10 packets of seeds. Their next step is to build a seed raising house which the project will fund.

One of the schools reestablishing their vegetable garden in among the remnants of their pre-cyclone garden.

Excellent assistance from the Australian Duke of Edinburgh
Award volunteers in the garden...

 ......and learning a bit more about Vanuatu.

POST SCRIPT...TVL have advised that the Ultimate Survivor event raised almost 500,000 vatu (NZD$6800/AUD$6150/Euro 4150) to be used by this project- WOW - WOW -WOW!!! 

a photo montage of the TVL Ultimate Survivor event...an excellent, fun fundraiser for the Green Hands Garden project

     

            

        

        
                       


 

 


 

                            

 

TVL CEO with the winning teams from each category.
(B)Young men from Tanna winners of the Men's;
 (M) French women winners of the Women's;
(F) and the front row winners of the Mixed.

Telecom Vanuatu Ltd agrees to support Green Hands Garden

We were thrilled to have secured additional support for the Green Hands Garden project through a major Vanuatu corporate, Telecom Vanuatu Ltd (TVL).

TVL has agreed that all funds raised from their community event, Ultimate Survivor, will benefit the project and ensure more schools can be included in re-establishing their vegetable gardens.

We are very eager to support TVL to get this inaugural event kicked off with the community participating by having fun, building teams and supporting the post Pam recovery through the Green Hands Garden project.

I will be delighted to report on the results in the next post. 

Feature in Daily Post newspaper advertising the event and the support for Green Hands Garden project.

...absolutely blown away by the seeds of support - tankiu tumas :)

We have been absolutely thrilled with the support that our friends, whanau, family and friends of friends and total strangers from around the world who have donated to this post cyclone Pam rebuild project. The contributions have been very generous and we are humbled by your trust in us. We are super excited about the work to date and what has been achieved with our enthusiastic partners.

We continue to work with more schools as we identify their needs. It has become apparent that many school groundsmen (yes they are all men) have been motivated to have seed raising houses following the cyclone, and with Mr M being able to show them the basics they are gearing up to grow their own seedlings. We think that this is a great outcome to develop the sustainability of this 'seed'project.

So a very exciting and important development has happened for us over the past few weeks. Telecom Vanuatu Ltd (TVL) are holding a fundraising event on 4th July and will be donating the proceeds to the Green Hands Garden project - yay, double yay and triple yay! This means that we will be able to fund more seed raising house than we originally thought and therefore your generous donations will go further!

If you are keen to donate, the New Zealand Westpac bank account is still open. Details are:
03-0435-0343133-000.

"Tankiu tumas bigwan. Mifala glad lo saport lo olgeta."

A great big thanks. We are so grateful for everyone's support.

What a way to celebrate Environment Week

The changes we saw in students today was hugely uplifting - from when we all did the first garden and the students didn't want to get their hands dirty to everyone one of them eager to muck in this time around. We continue to work closely with our neighbourhood school to see what works, and what is of interest to them.

Our most recent foray included a class session during the schools Environment Week with the premise of encouraging the students to value their environment and using recyclable materials. So in preparation for the week, Mr M and Paul the groundsman made a new vegetable bed and the students cleared another garden, both ready for planting new seedlings. I worked with the Agriculture teacher on a new class resource and activities for the students.

Doing an awesome job to make 8 m2 of new garden.

D-Day arrived and we spent a very enjoyable morning with a class using the resources we had developed. The Agriculture Teacher, Mrs Pakoa engaged the class in a lesson on how seeds grow, what grows well in Vanuatu and interestingly we added a section on 'How to read a seed packet'. We have noticed that many locals are buying seeds rather than harvesting traditional seeds and crops. We think this is for a couple of reasons:
- traditional seed harvest is not widely practiced in the urban areas, maybe because of lost knowledge and
- growers are looking to purchase seeds for vegetables that they traditionally haven't grown, and often this is to grow and sell in various local markets.

Showing the students how to read these images on a packet so
they can help their parents do the same.

We provided Mrs Pakoa the resources and her excitement spread through the school with other teachers coming to see what the students were undertaking today. At the end of the class lesson I assisted the students to make small seed raising pots using recycled toilet rolls and Mr M helped the more adventurous with plastic bottle seed houses. Such an awesome experience, and I think the teachers learnt something too.

A list of vegetables that grow well in Vanuatu; how long their seeds take to germinate, and how long before the vegetables can be harvested.

Mr M with recycled plastic drink bottles and a bit of string showing
these boys how to make a class room seed house.

The students all planted bean seeds in their seed pot and put them on the window sill to watch them grow- about 30 bean seeds planted in total.


The next part of the lesson was to plant up the new vegetable garden with seedlings, so 40 x chinese cabbage, 5 x tomatoes and 4 x watermelon seedlings planted by the students, who where then given a newly design sticker for their enthusiasm and effort.

The girls showing great care in watering the seedlings before planting.

Students and Teacher all got a sticker for their
awesome contribution to a successful activity.

POSTSCRIPT: Mrs Pakoa said that the students loved their activity and that the toilet roll seedlings were in the ground within 10 days! And that she brought some lettuce seedlings from home to plant in the school garden as well.....Magic!!!

The day after the lesson Mr M and Paul also fenced off the vege gardens to stop the local chickens and dogs from scratching it up! Looks great, and the students can still see their veges growing. 

Next step - some vegetable recipes for the school canteen!

Food Revolution Day - "teach every child about food"

I recently watch celebrity Chef Jamie Oliver give a TedEx Talk (although it was recorded in 2010!). He was on the start of his anti obesity mission in the USA then and was delivering some strong arguments for teaching American children about where food comes from and to help them make healthier food choices. 

From statistics that show the biggest killer of Americans are diet related preventable diseases to dumping a wheelbarrow of sugar on the stage (the amount of sugar American kids drink in their milk every year) the passionately delivered talk was a plea to schools and parents to make healthier food choices. 

More information about the Food Revolution and how you can get involved can be found here: http://www.foodrevolutionday.com/

While I assume that Vanuatu is not at the same level of obesity as the USA, and I'm sure many other developed countries, it is apparent that there will be added strain on the health system with a growing number of adults here diagnosed with diabetes and diet related diseases - and in time their children will face the same health related issues. It is also apparent that local children are eating more and more sugary food and drinks and convenience foods such as rice, noodles and bread and large portion sizes - especially of rice.

The Green Hands Garden project is supporting schools to establish school vegetable gardens to supply their canteen, and in turn provided healthy choices for students. In the future we hope to have a school resource written in the three national languages to accompany the garden project as a teaching resource that provides nutritious information about food from the garden and an appropriate recipe for the canteen to use.  

rethinking how to be effective...

We sat back and thought about how we could best utilise the generous donations made by family, friends, friends of friends and complete strangers. Our premise that food will have a dual purpose; to feed families and give people the opportunity to earn an income, still stood strong in our belief as an effective way to contribute to the rebuild. 

Interestingly the theme of the rebuild here is "Build Back Better", and so from our research and local knowledge we found that there were a lot of donated seeds being distributed across the country. We also became aware that in some cases (not all), locals don't usually grow food from seed, they usually grow their daily food source from cuttings and seeded vegetables. That being said there is increasing local knowledge around growing food from seed - and often this is food that is not traditional, or a usual food dietary item. 

So we thought with the "Build Back Better" mantra that to increase the success rate of seeds becoming food that we (I  mean Wayne really!) would grow and distribute seedlings instead of distributing seeds.

Purchased packets of seeds from Vanuatu Agriculture Supplies.
The standard packet of seeds is about 95vatu (NZ$1.20) and supports an established company
to support the employment of  locals.

First batch of seeds included DWARF BEANS; BOK CHOY; TOMATO

                                   
     

We were both surprised at how well the seedlings grew, in some cases the seeds
germinated within days so we needed to get them in the ground quickly !