Living without fridges & freezers

Every Tuesday and Thursday are the Blake family market days in our home city of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria. Jen braves the traffic, parks in a sea of vehicles, walks through sewage, smiles at the beggars, and moves from stall to stall for our groceries. However, the vegetable stall is the most important one because we long to eat fresh veggies. Still, once we get there we find: rotten tomatoes, wilted lettuce, dried-out carrots, cabbages starting to spoil, green beans beginning to shrivel up. These vegetables are almost always trucked 10 hours away from central Nigeria at Jos where the weather is cool, the rainfall is better, and the sunlight is less intense. Every Nigerian knows that the vegetable capital of the country is Jos not some semi-arid desert town like Maiduguri.

During our first July 2007 harvests at the INTERCEP (Intl. Centre for Peace, Charities & Human Dev.) farm at Maiduguri, we were amazed at what a little compost and a little water can do. Huge zucchini, beautiful squash, gigantic watermelons, thick green beans, plump sweet corn, beefy tomatoes, and hefty eggplant were all growing in this sandy soil. Thus, we began to understand that producing vegetables in raised plant beds, composts, and drip irrigation wasn't a problem. The first day that Jen took the vegetables to the International Hotel they asked her: "When did you come from Jos?" She said: "We are growing these beautiful vegetables 5 minutes away from his building?" to which they were astounded.

We have had no problem selling these vegetables to the hotels, locals marketers, and interested buyers. Commercial revenue has been generated proving to the local believers that we can pay our own farm caretaker from the sales of the vegetables. In August 2007, we held our first INTERCEP food security workshop in Maiduguri with Dave Goolsby from Healing Hands International in Nashville, Tennessee. Our trainees were skeptical at first as to the motivation of these people in bringing them to our farm for a farming workshop. However, after they saw the blessing of composting, they were thrilled to envision how vegetables could grow in the desert.

Nevertheless, a couple of our first workshop participants asked: "How do we preserve all of these vegetables after production?" It was an excellent question that neither Dave Goolsby nor any of the INTERCEP team was ready to answer. Therefore, Jen began to ask: "How could we teach our women to preserve these vegetables through canning?" Dave immediately called his wife, Janice, and discussed with her the possibility of simple preservation techniques. With Jen and Janice now both considering the possibilities, the idea of a fruit and vegetable preservation workshp was born.

If God wills, we hope to lauch our first food preservation workshop for the women of Maiduguri in early 2007. This will be followed by a vegetable production workshop for the almajirai (Quranic students), malamai (teachers), and parents of the almajirai. This will only increase the viability of our non-governmental organization (NGO) in Nigeria which is INTERCEP in Maiduguri. As the credibility of INTERCEP continues to resound throughout Borno State, the impact of self-sustainable agriculture will only be multiplied.