Always Have a Plan B
Having young children to care for meant Doña Santos couldn’t let grief stop her when she was recently widowed. So, she went from helping sell someone else’s vegetables to having her own cultivation space. Now she has a team of young people from the community who support her in growing and distributing the vegetables she harvests, and she is already planning to open her own small business close to home.
Church World Service and local partner Comisión de Acción Social Menonita (CASM) support local families in achieving nutritional food security through family agriculture. The focus is on health and nutrition training for rural families to strengthen their capabilities and promote their development.
Families like Doña Santos’ receive CASM’s technical support and participate in various production activities, learning environmental sanitation and sustainable agriculture practices. Participants also attend meetings with the local government and engage in activities related to women’s rights, entrepreneurship and self-care. Solutions to challenges around clean-water availability are also part of the program.
After Doña Santos started participating in these training sessions, she learned to use organic fertilizers, improve the quality of her crops and manage her income. She has a chicken coop and is working on a pen for pigs. She said, “I feel happy because now that I’m in this project, I’ve prospered a bit. I don’t have to buy food for my family anymore; everything comes from the land. And I’ve just been with a group of women learning how to make pickles.”
After many years of a grueling daily routine that starts at 4:30 in the morning, Doña Santos’ work has become exhausting for her health. She’s lately developed knee pain which prevents her from doing all the work on her farm and going out to sell her vegetables. She already has a solution. “I plan to open a mini market to sell my things, get more help with planting and harvesting, and keep reinvesting the income back into the business,” she said.
Honduras Macuelizo Program
Led by Church World Service and local partner Comisión de Acción Social Menonita (CASM)