Barefoot Farming

Hello from the annual ECHO conference! I'm writing this hiding in the room in between seminars whilst extrovert David is downstairs 'networking' with more delegates here. It has been a very intense few days, from packing and cleaning the 'west Africa' house and saying goodbye to the farm, to arriving at the conference and being double booked with rooms... and barging into the room of the middle aged board member, Tom (whom we went to the Preserve with on Sunday).

There is much 'food for thought' in the seminars and workshops, all in some way involved in a Christian response to hunger. There are many different nationalities here, different ages, different backgrounds and personalities, so we have met lots of interesting people. We met a radical twenty- something year old Christian, Noah, who (ironically?) lives on a boat and has made a 'lifestyle choice' of bare feet. His favourite word seems to be 'paradigm'- he has used it in every conversation and twice in the blurb about himself. Then there are a number of professors and super academic people with degrees and experience coming out of their ears, and development workers, our ECHO intern friends, and lots of others we haven't yet met.

Who built the ark?

We were chatting to a man this evening who works in Swaziland with an AIDS orphan project that he and his wife set up. He was a very interesting man with lots of stories, including finding a newborn baby in a plastic bag on their doorstep.
My head is spinning with agricultural development buzzwords and the enormous amount of information we have been given in the last few days. Today I went to a workshop in how to make 'Artemisia tea': a natural medicine grown from a plant, artemisia, and cures Malaria. The man who ran the seminar had worked in Ethiopia using natural medicines with the community. I hadn't really given natural medicines much thought before, but when I do think about it, it makes so much sense to use what is already there rather than import 'modern drugs' which contain the same plant extracts along with a heap of chemicals. The tea was pretty grim to drink to be honest, but I guess the saying 'no pain, no gain' is true in this case.

Nice Cuppa?

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