Empower Guatemalan Families With Food & Nutrition

Recently, families in the Seeds for a Future vegetable garden training program in Chocola held a COOKING FIELD DAY in the local park to celebrate their success in working together, learning to grow their own food and making a direct attack on the malnutrition that is estimated by the UN to affect over 50 percent of children and adults in Guatemala.

Each cooking team chose the dishes they would prepare using the nutritious herbs and vegetables they had grown in their home gardens. Foods included several types of tamalitos; a rich soup featuring a particular herb; cabbage, carrot and onion salad; bamboo shoot salad; chicken in jalapeño and onion salsa, and much more.  So that members can learn from each other new tasty ways to enhance the nutritional value of their family meals,
the recipes have been compiled and the recipe book is nearly ready for distribution.

The photos show what we admire about the women and their families in this rural village -- their determination, hope, good spirits and teamwork. In a community long guided by fixed ways of doing things, these people are true pioneers, breaking new ground by putting to use modern knowledge about food, nutrition and the benefits of a good diet.

This grass roots program is proving the efficacy and sustainability of teaching rural families, and most particularly women, to be more food self-reliant by growing at home a wide range of vegetables and herbs chosen especially for their high levels of nutrition, as well as poultry and rabbits for protein, to improve and balance family diets. So far, more than 250 families have joined the program and it continues to grow, with new members coming from an expanding circle of villages. 

Thank you so much for your continuing support!

Links:

• Seeds' Facebook page