By Alex Sanderson | Assistant to Patricia Parker MBE
Chickens for Eggs to help Grandmothers in Darfur – latest news
Life is unimaginably hard for grandparents in Darfur. Often they have lost their children, and many have their orphaned grandchildren to look after too. Life is tough in a community where everyone eats what they grow and the harvests have been poor. If there is no extended family to help, older people struggle to forage for food, many become weak with hunger and will starve if their neighbours cannot help them. Mukheit (acorn like seeds in the picture above) is toxic unless it is soaked and strained for several days. After that it is ground and made into a sort of gruel. Mukheit grows on arid shrubs across the sahil. People have to forage for it and it can take days to collect sufficient for a family - this is not easy for anyone. For old people it can be the only source of food - but in Darfur violence is an added real risk with many people attacked when they are walking for water, firewood and wild food.
Kids for Kids’s new Chickens Project is a lifeline! As you may know, we piloted the idea of providing chickens to grandparents last year, and the feedback was amazing. With your help we ran an Easter Campaign and were able to help families in our first Pilot Project. We wanted to be sure that providing three healthy chickens and a rooster would really help frail and elderly people. Many live on their own and are particularly vulnerable. It is even worse when they are the sole support of orphaned grandchildren. The difference it made to have eggs to eat, from chickens that are easy to look after, was incredible.
Your help literally transforms lives! As one Grandmother put it: “Thank you for saving my family. I have 2 grandchildren who I have been struggling to look after. My daughter died from measles, and I am all alone looking after them. I was afraid I would too would die and what would become of my grandchildren? Now we have eggs to eat we have hope and I am getting stronger again.”
More to do: Kids for Kids has adopted 70 villages and helped over 350,000 people so far. This year we are adopting 8 more villages and we would love to provide chickens there too. Following the success of our Easter Pilot Project we know that giving chickens really helps.
Please will you help support a grandparent to feed herself and her family? No one else remembers frail and fragile elderly people in the villages of North Darfur. This is why Kids for Kids needs your help. People say they have given up hope in the international community, but not in Kids for Kids. Thank you for making this possible.
$21 buys 3 laying hens and a rooster
$45 Provides training for local people to care for the animals in the village
$600 trains a Paravet for the whole community
Thank you for your support!
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