- Alfred Fornah/ Vidal Sesay
PILGRIMAGE TO THE BOLI LAND!
We arrive at the Sanda Magbolontor boli lands on a pilgrimage of discovery and we find acre upon acre of rice stretching as far as the eye can see! Eleven villages coming together under one banner to harvest this magnificent bounty, each village tending, harvesting and profiting from their own patch of boli rice.
We learn this vast bounty is all being harvested by hand - a month in and counting! Here in Sanda Magbolontor - one of the most disadvantaged chiefdoms in Sierra Leone - there is no tractor, no thresher to hire.
It's a sad fact that our country used to export rice rather than import the inferior grain we now rely on to feed our people and an even sadder reflection on how little our agriculture sector has progres-sed with less than 2% of our agricultural land farmed using mechanizati-on.
Take a moment - if you will - and just imagine what these hard-working sons and daughters of the Sanda soil could achieve, how much more rice they could produce with even moderately modern equipment like a tractor! Machines and equipment that all developed and even many developing nations, rightly take for granted.
Diaspora volunteer Mo explains:
"People are hungry in Sierra Leone. They need food now not in some decades time - we want to try and help Sanda become self-sufficient in staples like rice - good quality, nutritious home-grown boli land rice.
Our master farmer, Andrew, came up with an absolute brainwave back in January at our villages meet - to expand Hope's horizons beyond our inland valley swamp rice to these vast, fertile Sanda boli lands which have the greatest potential to quickly boost rice production to feed our people and improve our long term food security."
One of Hope's main goals is to improve food security for the communities we work with and also for our interim care and kinship fostering programmes feeding vulnerable children."
And Hope Sakuma's ambitions for Sanda Magbolontor don't stop there! We hear plans are afoot to establish a seed bank next year for all Sanda farmers and we learn Andrew's identified two more boli lands that lie fallow and unproductive...
Joining us in the boli lands ABC (agricultural business centre) manager, Sheku, who tells us the secret of Hope Sakuma's success:
"The women in Sanda are always smiling. For us men we know that is a good thing. The women like that they are treated equally, that they are invited to every meeting and can speak freely and for themselves and they are listened to."
Sheku tells us that this Sierra Leone farming organization is encouraging and involving women more than any other in Sanda to deliver on their goals of boosting food security and improving nutrition.
Hope Sakuma are achieving this by harnessing the spirit of innovative volunteerism, in turn unleashing the power of gender equality and it looks to us like these just may be an unstoppable and winning combination!
