Healthy Kitchens and Cooking for Nutrition

July, 2017 -- Household visits continue to be the best way to transfer knowledge and skills to the women and families in Seeds for a Future's programs. Our local team members -- well-trained in nutrition, hygiene and raising food in backyard farms -- visit frequently, and also use small group meetings, usually at a participating family's home, so women can receive and absorb information in an environment that feels familiar and safe. 

In addition to kitchen and personal hygiene, we also promote other aspects of cleanliness, both inside and outside the home, that contribute to family health.  For example, most families own at least a few chickens, and it is common practice to let them roam freely.  This has a number of consequences:

• It's not very healthful to have chickens and other poultry in the house and yard where babies and children play and where food prep and cooking occur.
• You may never know where the chickens are putting their eggs, so this highly concentrated source of nutrition never makes it to family tummies.
• Dogs and other predators may eat the poultry, which is both a financial and a nutritional loss.
• In the rainy season, chickens that run loose are highly susceptible to diseases and a large percentage die -- more financial and nutritional loss.

Our Seeds for a Future team emphasizes the value of building chicken hutches and demonstrates that the benefits far outweigh the cost, especially since we encourage the use of readily available local materials such as bamboo.  We show how the birds thrive when they can a roost above ground and under a simple protective roof, and also teach how to vaccinate against rain-provoked diseases

Cleaner homes and patios, healthier and more productive chickens, and families getting nutritious eggs to eat -- a win-win strategy!  

To see a short presentation from our June field visit, click the link below.

If it has been some time since your last much-appreciated contribution, I ask you to consider renewing your support so we can continue to help families live cleaner, healthier lives, eat nutritious food for every meal and build self-reliance.  Won’t you reach out again to help these determined families improve their own lives?

Thank you for your generous support!  

Links:

• CHECK OUT Our June Visit to Chocola

Starting in 2014, Seeds for a Future was charged with field implementation of a major project on fighting malnutrition and emphasizing clean and healthy kitchens and households.  Funded by the Nestlé Nutrition Foundation of Switzerland, this project gave us the opportunity to work with 200 young mothers in a rural area of Guatemala.  In 2016 we were able to include women from another 200 families in a similar project, funded by the Taiwanese government.  

Thus, more than 400 rural women participated in small neighborhood learning groups on kitchen and household hygiene, safe food handling and preparation as well as tasty ways to include better nutrition in daily meals.  Even more important, Seeds staff made regular home visits to coach and encourage the women -- to drop off printed information, to answer questions and to reinforce basic practices.  It was heart-warming to see how much the women appreciated learning how they could keep their children and families healthier by preventing illness and serving high-nutrition foods.  Their joy at learning these skills not only resulted in better lives for their families, bur produced two other important results:

• The women shared their knowledge with their daughters, sisters, mothers and other friends and relatives, so that many hundreds of women absorbed these important lessons, and
• The women gained a sense of personal value and importance which they may not have previously felt, and which has empowered many to think of additional steps they can take to help their family's health and economic situation.

Both the Nestlé and Taiwan projects are finished now, but the Seeds Team has continued working with many of women who had participated, and of course, we offer the same training and coaching to women who were not part of either of the two large programs.

Your support has helped us bring coaching and training in Healthy Kitchens and Cooking for Nutrition to more than 1000 women in rural Guatemala, and has resulted in a better life for all their children and families.  Your generosity is making an important IMPACT.  Please join us in helping more women learn with joy and empowerment and DONATE TODAY!!