An Alberta farmer has written a book about teaching African farmers how to become more self-sufficient.
Greetings from Zambia – letters home from an overseas volunteer is a collection of e-mail newsletters Marianne Stamm sent back to friends and family over the six years she has been travelling to Africa with her husband, Robert.
She describes the book as a description of their journey and the stories of the small-scale farmers they have been working with in Zambia.
One of the newsletters describes a church service during an Easter weekend where hundreds of harmonious voices filled the air with heartfelt singing.
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“It was just a colourful, joyful, wonderful place to be. The little kids were dancing to the music. Everybody dances to the music. Africans are born dancing to music,” said Stamm.
Despite the joyous occasion, Stamm couldn’t help feeling an overwhelming sense of sorrow knowing that many of the children singing in the church that day will die long before they should because of AIDS and malnutrition.
“When you look over that sea of faces and most of them are young, your heart just breaks to think that these people aren’t living past 30 or 40 and they should be.”
Stamm was born in Switzerland and immigrated to Canada with her family when she was five. She grew up on a dairy farm near Cecil Lake, B.C.
She moved back to Switzerland in 1979 after marrying a Swiss farmer and lived on a mixed farm there until 1991 when the couple returned to Canada to operate a grain farm in Westlock, Alta.
They farmed in Alberta until 2005 and then rented the land because neither of their two sons expressed interest in the operation.
Earlier that year, the couple took their first trip to Zambia. Their church, the Cedar Creek Christian Fellowship, was looking for volunteers to help start a banana plantation.
It began as a church project and has morphed into a personal crusade for the Alberta couple.
“Robert and I are free agents. We don’t work for anybody. We pay all our own trips,” said Stamm, who writes a blog on her adventures for The Western Producer.
This month, the Stamms are making their seventh annual trip to Zambia. They are teaching church groups and growers how to make better use of “incredibly fertile” land.
“Nobody should be hungry. There are large, white commercial farmers who are growing fantastic crops,” said Stamm.
During the first trip, they wanted to help struggling small-scale farmers in the Mpongwe region of the country become better producers. But there was also a less altruistic motivation.
“I don’t know what we’ll do if we don’t go to Africa. I’m not staying at home in wintertime. After two months, I’ve had enough.”
The couple has provided “micro-loans” to 13 church groups and about 40 individual farmers in Mpongwe.
They have given out $10,000 in loans, using some of their own money and some from other Canadian farmers.
But Stamm said the real solution is education, not money, which is why they spend most of their time teaching farmers about crop nutrition, planting spacing, weeding and other agronomic practices.
A big priority is teaching conservation farming techniques to replace the slash and burn methods that are currently employed.
“It’s sort of like our no-till system
adapted to the hoe and to the tropical conditions,” Stamm said.
Proceeds from the book will fund another pet project of hers, which is to teach Zambians about herbal medicine.
She thinks herbal medicine is a good solution for people in rural areas who have no access to doctors but are able to grow the plants.
For more information, visit www.mariannestamm.com.
