Food Security for Dummies

Having spoken with some others in my group, I consider myself very lucky to be as busy as I’ve been. While my counterpart (a staff nurse) has little time for the sort of community outreach my job is supposed to entail, I’ve become friendly with a number of people very active in the community, including teachers, community health workers, doctors, and farmers. When I don’t have anywhere else to go, I always have my office, where I can shadow the doctors, talk with patients, and just hang out. But there’s still a lot of down time.

One day I was bored and decided I should start my own kitchen garden. This sounds very quaint, but making your home garden the Peace Corps way takes something like a hundred (wo)man-hours of labor. Feel free to skip the next section if homestead food production doesn’t tickle your fancy.

How to Make Your Own Kitchen Garden (And Other Time-Consuming Projects for the Home)

First you need compost, which requires an entire cubic meter of green and dead leaves (note: leaf piles, and even rakes, are not a thing here), so this means going to the forest to gather ten sacks of leaves. Break all those leaves up into little pieces to aid in the decomposition process. Then you need twenty liters of manure—in contrast, this is rather easy to come by. After mixing up the green leaves, dead leaves, manure, and 40 liters of water and assembling the mess into a giant leaf cube, you can let it sit for a few weeks.

Now you need seeds! A 45-minute, very very cramped bus ride takes you to the nearest city. You find most of your seeds without a hitch, but can’t seem to locate potato seeds anywhere (note: you’ve been parading around like you know a lot about agriculture, but really you’re a health volunteer. You don’t yet know that potato seeds are really just potatoes that have sprouted). Eventually a young man takes pity on you and brings you to a potato salesman, who sells you five kilos of potatoes when really you only need two. You take another cramped bus back to your home.

You could plant those seeds now, but a lot of them won’t sprout or go well if you don’t develop them in a nursery first. You clear a small area and to fill your polybags with soil and compost, placing two seeds in each. Then you construct a mini green house out of bamboo and plastic tarp. Water daily and protect from the elements, and you’ll have some sprouts growing within a few weeks.

Back to the garden. After clearing a 5x5 meter area, you have to build berms (embankments) all around to slow the water and dig swales (channels) on all sides for rainwater collection, with holes at the corners. Ideally you should plant some perennials in the berms (to prevent erosion and provide medicinal or additional edible plants), but you haven’t been able to locate any aloe, sweet potato, or papaya saplings thus far. To keep the chickens out, you construct a sort of fence out of sticks.

Now that you’ve protected your garden, you can dig your bed for planting. After you dig your bed, dig it again—this time twice as deep, so your plants can really stretch their roots. Add your compost, throw in some ash and charcoal, and fill it up. Do all this again for the second and third beds.

Finally, you can plant. Instead of going in a line, you do this in a triangular manner (to maximize space) and, taking advantage of the mutualistic relationships between different certain crops, plant two or three crops per bed. For example: corn (a stalk and heavy feeder), potatoes (a root and a light feeder), and soybeans (a climber and a heavy giver). The nutritional and space requirements of these plants allow for close spacing without depleting the soil.

Congratulations! You’ve just completed the ultimate kitchen garden, with all the boons organic fertilizer, nursery development, and permaculture have to offer. You’re where I hope to be in a month.

Compost pile (a bit smaller than it should be, but I got lazy)

The beginnings of a permagarden

If the above reads like a complaint, I can assure you that I wouldn’t be doing this if I weren’t enjoying it, and if it weren’t useful. Initially, I had intended to wait a little while before developing a garden at home. A conversation with the agricultural veterinarian, however, accelerated my plans. “You want to teach people new agricultural techniques, like a kitchen garden?” he said (in Nepali). “Then you should build a kitchen garden at your house! And then everyone from the community will see your garden, and see your results, and will want you to teach them how to do the same thing in their homes.” I almost hugged him.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to be successful at this job. Our food security project has a clear framework and we’ve received all sorts of language, cultural, and technical training to aid us in promoting changes in behavior that will improve agriculture and health. But in practice, as an outsider who barely speaks the language, who knows next to nothing about the community, things are a lot hazier.

There are a lot of ways I could try to be of assistance. One is to look at the problems in the community, devise a solution, and convince people it will work. Sometimes this is tempting, and in certain cases it might even work, but this not what Peace Corps wants us doing.

Another is to meet people, question them about their problems, and ask how I can help. When I did this at a farmer meeting, the farmers told me that their biggest problem was soil quality, and that they really want to start using more organic fertilizer. So I’m doing a compost training with them next month, which I’m really excited and nervous about. But this method also has its downsides. Often, when I ask how I can help, people say I should teach them English. When I ask why they want to learn English, they often don’t have a real reason.

I've found that a third and often more fun way is to do things that get people’s attention and make them wonder. This is what the agrovet was getting at. As another example, my first week here I started “tea” composting. Essentially, this entails filling a drum with kitchen scraps and manure (with small holes for aeration and a larger one for drainage), adding some water, and waiting a few weeks as your concoction decomposes. Then, every other day you add a liter of water and collect the “tea”, which after being diluted makes a nutritious snack for the plants. My family had previously been discarding kitchen scraps around the garden, which was an eyesore and seemed like a waste. They thought it more than a little strange when I brought home a brand new drum and proceeded to poke a bunch of holes in it, but after I explained the method to the madness, they jumped on board. Now my host mom dumps all her kitchen scraps in the bin.

Word about my odd behavior has also been getting around the community. People sometimes come to my house just to look at the compost tea drum and uncompleted permagarden. Doing things that Nepalis find odd makes for both a great icebreaker and a teaching opportunity (e.g. Nepali man: what the heck are you doing with that thing? Me: it’s a composting technique that will improve the soil quality and increase agricultural production). Yeah, conversations like that are how I get my kicks these days.

The hardest question people ask me (and which I get on a daily basis) is what I’m doing here. I usually say that I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer working on a food security project, and that my job is to give agricultural and health technical assistance. That job description is so vague, but it is rightfully so. The truth is I really don’t know what I should be doing here, at least not yet. I don’t know if a hand-washing lesson will be redundant for these children; if a beekeeping training will be relevant to these farmers; if an HIV/AIDS program will be over the heads of these mothers.

So for the moment, I’m a trainee again, and I feel like a dummy. I’m learning countless new things every day: how to ride the public bus; in which season the mangoes ripen; who has an alcohol problem; who are the most respected members in the community; what services exist for victims of domestic violence; and, most importantly, which shop has the best tea.