“Do you see change taking place in your work?” This is a question that people often ask me after having spent a number of years in Nicaragua working with World Renew. It’s a good question, and also one that is hard to put into words.

 

This is a question that people often ask me after having spent a number of years in Nicaragua working with World Renew. It’s a good question, and also one that is hard to put into words.

A significant part of my work involves planning, monitoring and evaluating the programs that World Renew supports. Often a program involves a large number of communities that I typically visit in the program planning stages and do not return to until an evaluation at the end of the program.

Last week I was part of a team that evaluated a food security program in the central mountain region of Nicaragua that World Renew and the Foods Resource Bank support. This part of the country is scenic and rugged but known for high rates of malnutrition among children, limited access to education and health services, and limited income opportunities other than farming.

So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today – to love the LORD your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul – then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Deuteronomy 11:13-15

Many men work as day laborers on the bigger ranches and own or rent small fields where they plant corn and beans—the two staples of the local diet. Yields, even by Nicaraguan standards, are low due to erosion and years of mono-cropping. Interestingly, fruit and vegetables are not a big part of the produce grown here. During the dry season many people are obliged to leave their families to go to Costa Rica for months at a time to work in the melon and sugarcane fields so that the small stream of income they earn can sustain their families. Women earn some extra incomepicking coffee, but again it is seasonal. For most families, life is not easy. There is a lot of backbreaking work for little reward.

The goal of this program is to ensure that all households “have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food during the entire year.” Farmers learned to increase their yields by improving the fertility of the soil by rotating crops and using organic fertilizers. New varieties of crops were introduced to diversify their product and provide cash flow during the traditionally cash-strapped months. 

New agricultural practices help conserve the soil and preserve water resources. Families began vegetable gardens, watering their plants using household wastewater, so that they can produce food near their homes that complements their narrow diet. And included in the project were innovative new ways to store the crops and a component to help landless farmers get access to land ownership.

Of the twenty communities in this food security project, we selected a random sample offour communities for an evaluation visit. Each day we met with local leaders to get a sense of the program’s impact on their community. After that, we broke into focus groups with program participants to assess the effectiveness and sustainability of the program.

We ended each day by visiting a cross-section of the participants’ homes and walking through their fields. We also used some innovative technology: prior to the evaluation we asked several of the communities to prepare videos that document the changes that occurred during the three years of the program. Allow me to share some feedback.

• Many families attested that for the first time they have food in the home all year round, even in the acute “silent period” that typically occurs in the three months leading up to the next harvest season. They proudly ushered me into their homes to show the corn and beans they still had on hand.
• We heard testimonies from men who in the past were obliged to leave their families to go to Costa Rica and no longer had to migrate seasonally because they could generate sufficient economic activity by staying at home.
• We saw a number of men and women experimenting with simple drip irrigation systems to grow vegetables during the dry season. Even though everything else was brown, these vigorous seedlings were emerging.
• Many families now have water piped into their home rather than carrying it in pails from a stream. This has resulted in immediate health benefits as well as easing the load for women and children who would typically dedicate hours each day to this chore.
• For me, the best part of this evaluation visit was seeing barren plots of land that I recalled from three years earlier turned into lush oases of vegetation, abounding with tropical fruit, tubers, and vegetables.

To make a program like this work, it takes a lot of tremendous hard work and coordination from many people. I am in awe of the staff that I work with, the hundreds of volunteers that share their time and skills, and the determined spirit of the thousands of lives that we impact. In one of the focus groups one weathered old farmer said that he wanted to thank the people who support this project for their generosity. So to answer the question that was poised a
t the beginning of this letter… Definitely, yes. I see God using all of us to make incredible changes in Nicaragua!!

If you would like to read the actual evaluation report, just send me an email. Also a couple of the evaluation videos can be downloaded for viewing at:

• www.youtube.com/watch?v=A87Q-6Vvv8Y&feature=youtu.be 
• www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJNNrxm5nk&list=PL9116954C23CD88B5&index=12
   

Prayer requests:

• Even though the results of this evaluation are encouraging, there are still a lot of obstacles that these families face. One of the recommendations of the evaluation was to continue working in this area and focus on postharvest storage, marketing, and climate-change adaptation. In the next couple of months, we will be designing a strategy for how to do this. Pray that we seek God’s leading in this.

Thank you for the role you play in partnership bringing change to these communities. 

Mark VanderWees