Please, please, please consider donating

I'm sorry to steal from someone else's blog, but I really don't think he'll mind. I found this story to be incredibly moving and inspiring, and it describes why it is so important for everyone to consider donating to One Acre Fund. This is by a guy named Jake who spent the summer of 2007 working to expand One Acre Fund's operations (read more here).

From Jake:

"There are some stark differences, however, between my farm life then and the lives of the Kenyan farmers now. The lady I visited was a widow named Josephine. She was young, but you could read the years of struggling to survive in the lines on her face. She had four small children. Her small, 3⁄4 acre farm did not produce enough for her to adequately feed her family. She couldn’t afford to buy the badly needed fertilizer to enrich her nutrient-depleted soil. In fact, the yield her land produced was only enough to feed her family for four months out of the year. The other eight months she (in her own words), “relied on the grace of God” to be able to feed her family. During the hunger season, she would routinely have to leave her children in the early morning to go hire herself out to work on other farms all day – earning about 75 cents a day – so that she could afford to buy the family’s one meal of the day. Each child would have a cup of tea in the morning and some corn flour porridge or ugali for his one meal at night when she got home. This extreme level of malnutrition has greatly weakened Josephine’s children. The young ones may not make it. She has already lost five children…their young, malnutritioned bodies finally succumbed to malaria because she could not afford mosquito nets to protect the children or malaria medication to treat the disease.

Situations like hers kind of make you want to just sit down and have a good cry. But not her…strangely, she hangs on to hope, and she continues to persevere daily….

There are thousands like Josephine here.

One of the most difficult parts of my job on this project is that I have to select one small area (called a sub-location here) of about 5,000-8,000 farmers for One Acre Fund to help. I must choose from about 82 such sub-locations in the Kakamega District – each with at least 3,000-4,000 poor farmers. The sad reality is that the organization only has the resources to reach so many people…"

Please consider donating to One Acre Fund and helping them to reach these people. $20 a month (what some of us drop on a couple of Starbucks lattes on our way to work) can mean the difference between helping a person feed their entire family, or watching them starve to death.

To donate, visit One Acre Fund.

Kenya feel the love tonight?

This is my first blog post ever, as I am still a child of the 20th century ...from back in the days before people believed that the whole world was interested in peering at their every move like they were on TV. But we are all exhibitionists these days, so here we go...

I hope that our friends and family (or at least Sid's and my mothers, who are the only people that I know will actually read this regularly...Hi moms!) will keep up with us on our latest adventure, which is that we are moving to Kenya in September to work with an organization called One Acre Fund!

One Acre Fund is a non-profit organization that works with poor, chronically hungry people in rural Kenya and Rwanda. They provide basic farming tools and supplies on credit, teach families better farming practices, and connect them with markets to sell their produce. One Acre Fund families have the potential to grow 10 times more food and to make profits that will permanently lift them out of poverty. To see the impact of One Acre Fund's work, please visit their website or just check out the picture below.

The maize field on the left is One Acre Fund supported and field on the right is not. These fields were planted the same week!

Sid and I will be living in a rural town called Bungoma, which is located on the western side of the country near the Uganda border. I will be managing communications and administrative aspects of the organization and Sid will be heading up several software development projects. We will both be working toward the organization's shared goal of reaching 30,000 families in the next 3 years!

Please keep in touch with us during this amazing adventure, and please come and visit!