The orphanages that I have visited in Uganda rely heavily on donors and their generosity. It’s hard to not hand out band-aids that briefly cover wounds that are deeper than just mere scratches. We can buy food for orphans. We can send money and buy large bunches of bananas and millet flour to fill 90+ bellies for a week. But what happens the week after when your money has run out and the bananas are all eaten?
One of the pillars of ISEE Solutions is sustainability. ISEE does not want to become a permanent donor for one home filled with children. What we want to do is help create sustainable solutions that allow the homes to generate their own food and income to continue to feed those children even when the donor pockets are empty.
A friend shared this TED Talk with me about a town in England that has changed its green spaces into Incredible Edible spaces. Uganda is a very fertile country. Could this idea not be a solution for the hundreds of orphanages trying to keep little bellies filled, not to mention all the other families that go hungry (65,000 families go hungry each day according to a billboard I read in Kampala.)
Why grow grass unless it’s to feed animals? There are challenges that this idea would have to overcome in a nation like Uganda as compared to a nation like Great Britain but sometimes it just takes a few people who think outside of the box.
Here’s the link to the TED talk. I have yet to figure out how to embed the video into my post directly.
Watch and let’s put our heads together to see how we can tweak this idea to make it work in Uganda. Got ideas? Contact me: erika (a) iseesolutions (dot) org
