As Food For The Poor’s El Salvador program manager, Tricia Szymanski often travels to the country to check on various FFP endeavors underway to improve the lives of the poor communities FFP serves.
Here she reports on her April trip:
During my April trip, I visited a completed project in the area of Cojutepeque. In these communities, 40 individual families benefit from a project that provided a chicken coop, 20 layer hens and all the veterinary supplies and concentrated feed necessary for the first several months of the project.
I was very impressed with the project. The women of the households were in charge of the projects, as they spend the most time in the home. They attended two thorough training sessions and learned all about the layer hens and how to maintain their projects. Among the families I visited, everyone was harvesting 19-20 eggs a day! Not only does this provide healthy, nutritious, fresh eggs for the families, but it is a sufficient number of eggs to allow them to sell some. The women explained that they were selling the eggs for 10 cents each, and they had already been saving the money to ensure that they would have a decent amount of savings established when it became time to purchase their own concentrate and veterinary supplies.
I was overwhelmed to listen to these women as they proudly showed me the completed layer farms and described how they care for the animals to ensure the best egg production possible. The children were also very excited and were eager to assist in any way they could. I asked several of the children how they best enjoyed eating the eggs, and the overwhelming answer was “hard boiled.”
Evidence of the project’s success were the proud, smiling faces, the full satisfied looks on the children’s faces and the empty egg shells in the kitchen!
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