Preserving a Heritage

by James Ellett, Grant writing intern

Everybody loves a good family heirloom.

When I was about 15 years old, I received from my father my very first heirloom: my grandfather’s old hunting knife. With a handle inlaid with beautiful wood and a mountain lion engraved on the 5 inch blade, it was truly a majestic tool. I was in awe that I was now in possession of this ancient relic that conjured up images of frontier beaver trappers and rugged cowboys. What I decided to do with my piece of family history truly helped to preserve the history and memories that it held.

I used it to practiced my knife-throwing skills.

As you can guess, my 15-year-old self--all 5 foot 10, 100 pounds of me--did not actually have any knife-throwing skills. After bludgeoning many a tree with the knife’s handle and chasing after hundreds of errant throws (they didn’t miss by much, I swear), I learned to treat the knife with the proper amount of respect it deserves. This object had been handed down through generations. It had first been my grandfather’s, then my father’s, and now it was mine. It had travelled the very road that led to my own creation. To be stripped of this heirloom would not just be losing a knife, it would be losing a story of my heritage--of where I, James Ellett, came from.

The people of the hill tribes of Northern Thailand are being stripped of an heirloom that provides much more than stories: their land. The lands occupied by these tribes have been handed down to them through generations, and are absolutely crucial to their way of life, as they are used for villages, medicine, food, and construction materials. Unfortunately, most governments don’t recognize ancestral ownership as legal, and the Thai government is no different. Just as I cannot prove that I own my grandfathers knife with a receipt or certificate of ownership, these people cannot prove that the land belongs to them.

In fact, according to the Thai government, the land of the tribespeople--who are not Thai citizens--is a forest reserve, and it is being occupied illegally. Authorities have begun prosecuting these rural farmers, claiming that their communities and agricultural practices are destroying these “forest reserves” and contributing to global warming. Some farmers are facing fines of up to $49,000 USD, and are even being charged criminally. In reality, the hill tribes do not destroy their native terrain. Their belief in the holiness of the land and of spirits occupying all of nature causes them to treat their environment with the utmost respect. Their rotational farming actually helps the soil by re-fertilizing it. They are an ally of their land, not a threat. Be these facts as they may, the oppression continues because they have historically had nobody to advocate for them. These rural farmers are being forced off of the land of their ancestors, leaving them with no place to go.

Since 2005, Plant With Purpose has been working with the hill tribe people of Northern Thailand, facilitating training on property and citizenship rights, as well as innovative agriculture and business training. We realize that all the agricultural and economic training in the world will do very little good if the people have no land on which to live. That is why, in 2009, Plant With Purpose assisted 134 hill tribe members in the process of receiving Thai citizenship as part of the ongoing battle against injustice in the northern highlands.

Please keep your prayers with the people of Northern Thailand and with the work that Plant With Purpose is doing there. The hill tribes are being stripped of an heirloom that tells the story of their very identity and supplies the resources that they need to live. Let us pray that God will keep the people and the land together, and proceed to heal them both.

Haiti Relief Update: Plant With Purpose Spills the Beans

by Aly Lewis

Plant With Purpose has supplied 2,716 farmers with 79, 225 pounds of local bean seeds as a part of our relief and recovery project in Haiti. Farmers planted these seeds back in February and the results are cropping up across farmers’ fields. Beans are a two-month crop and farmers will be able to harvest their produce in just a couple of weeks, which will enable them to meet their household staple needs and also generate income by selling surplus beans at the market. This will increase food security in the communities where we work and provide food to be exported to urban areas.

Below, you can see how the results of Plant With Purpose’s seed distribution project are “sprouting up:”

With Plant With Purpose’s help, farmers are growing nutritious food to feed their families in the next harvest.

Thanks to everyone for their continued support and prayers for our recovery project, and don’t be afraid to spill the beans about the great work Plant With Purpose is doing in Haiti! ( I apologize for the excessive use of puns in this post, but hey, I’m a wordsmith, not a bean counter)

Women, Children and Winos

by Doug Satre

Earlier this month I had the privilege of visiting Plant With Purpose’s work in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca is one of the poorest parts of Mexico, and the “Mixteca” is the poorest part of Oaxaca, seen by most outsiders as a hopeless backwater. On the day we spent in Oaxaca City, our tour guide, Raul, summed it up like this, “The only people who live up there are women, children and winos. The men are all gone.” While this was something of an overstatement, it pretty well summed up the challenges the Mixteca region faces; poverty has caused most of the working-age men to look for work elsewhere.

I don’t think Raul had actually ever been to the Mixteca, or at least not to the communities where PWP is working. If he had, he might have come away with a different impression. PWP works among 47 communities and is seeing a dramatic improvement in the economic development. I was especially impressed to meet a young couple, Alier and Isabel, who have become respected leaders in the community of Loma Chimedia.

Alier is the leader of the local farmer’s cooperative. The greenhouse that they share with five other families produces a total income of about $2,500 per year, essentially doubling their household income. By working together the farmers are overcoming a variety of obstacles to their success, and have recently purchased a truck in order to transport their produce to town to sell. Not only are they succeeding economically, they are giving their community more reasons to be proud of their heritage and their community and creating reasons to hope for a better future.

As I listened to the stories of their success, I wondered what our tour guide would have thought. Maybe next time we can bring him to the Mixteca with us.

Plant With Purpose Freedom Parade

By Aly Lewis

I don’t usually like to talk about freedom. I’m more of an interdependent (not to be confused with codependent) type of philosophizer. Not that I don’t like freedom; I’m just more apt to find myself exasperated with the individualistic, isolated, and often disconnected culture in which I live. More often than not, I overcompensate by focusing entirely on our inevitable and undeniable interconnectedness—both with each other and with our environment. But this week I’m putting aside my desire to flaunt my counter-cultural dependency ideas in order to take a deeper look at freedom and what that means in our lives as Americans, as Christians, and as people living in this interconnected world.

As humans we all feel trapped sometimes. We get caught in toxic cycles of our own design and vicious cycles far beyond our control. We become paralyzed, imprisoned by real or perceived barriers from which we can see no readily accessible escape route or hope of a better day. As much as I’m enamored with the idea of interdependency and community and sharing, freedom is a good thing, a vital thing, a Godly thing. Freedom is the ability to choose, to live, to love.

In honor of the Fourth of July, this week we’ll be touching on different aspects of freedom—political freedom, economic freedom, spiritual freedom. We’ll talk about the ways Plant With Purpose works to bring freedom to rural farmers trapped in vicious cycles of poverty and deforestation. We’ll talk about the ways we can work toward greater freedom in our own lives. We may even bring out the sparklers and barbecue to celebrate Burundian Independence Day (which, by the way, is July 1^st).

So pick up those visors and water bottle misters and join us for our week long Freedom Parade.

Keep Your Coins, I Want Change

By Kate McElhinney This catchy and thought-provoking phrase was the headline of a recent article* I read that reviewed how people act with either contempt or compassion toward the homeless.

I consider myself to be on the compassionate side, (although I’m working on this, thanks to Aly’s last post.) But ultimately, this article sparked a tangent thought, (during English class in college this would have resulted in a stern look from my professor, but stay with me on this!)

People often ask how they can get involved with Plant With Purpose. Often times, they want to travel to one of our programs and see how we are working side by side with the poor. This is possible through one of our vision or church trips, but once there, people quickly find that there isn’t an opportunity to pitch in, such as building a house or tilling the land. We hire local agronomists and directors to offer guidance, but these are the only people who are necessary. Since the farmers are empowered, they don’t need our help with the labor and we become observers.

So how can people help? Serving the rural poor, our brothers in Christ, is the core mission of Plant With Purpose. But for those who want to get involved, sometimes the best way is to look locally. Plant With Purpose’s compassionate philosophy can be used as a model to help the local homeless.

A great example of this is Coast Vineyard Church. Every weekday at 11:15 a.m., a team of church members who call themselves “The Branch Ministry” meet at Mission Bay and hang out with the poor. They share food, stories, and the gospel. Over time they have forged friendships with the local homeless and many of them now regularly attend Coast.

So, from what I’ve seen, helping the poor is about more than giving change. Sure, money is helpful for buying clothes or food. But this is a temporary solution. To see a lasting impact, we have to offer compassion as Christians and walk with the poor. Many are looking for transformation, and giving a bit of time goes a long way.

*This article was posted on www.ecclesiacollective.org.

Village Spotlight: Nuxiño, Mexico

Nuxiño, Mexico, with a population of 1,000, is one of the larger communities where Plant With Purpose works. Located 2 hours Northwest of Oaxaca City, this community is a local capital and therefore the area has schools up to the secondary level, a jail, and a health clinic. Although community members have access to more services than many of the farmers in more isolated communities, poverty and environmental degradation are critical problems that threaten the very livelihood of the people of Nuxiño. To the north, the land is dry and barren; to the south, there are thinning pines. Without adequate access to water or proper forest management, the people of Nuxiño will become further entrenched in desperate poverty. Plant With Purpose's life-changing projects in Nuxiño include soil conservation, credit cooperatives, reforestation efforts, community tree nurseries, church partnerships, and handicrafts, and are designed to help farmers care for their land, provide for their families, and build a better future for their children. Partner with Plant With Purpose to plant hope in Nuxiño. Click here to find out how you can help make a difference in the lives of rural farmers in Nuxiño, Mexico.

Plant a tree and transform a life

Scott Sabin, Executive Director of Plant With Purpose, is featured on SDNN.com today. Read his article to find out why planting trees does more than just reduce your carbon footprint:

Scott Sabin: Stop the carbon footprints

While talk of carbon trading is all the buzz these days, I have to wonder, can tree planting have a greater impact than merely soothing our guilty, carbon consuming consciences?

For many of the world’s poorest people, their very survival is contingent on the health of their environment. Of course the same applies to us, but in a much more removed way. It’s easy to forget that our bottled water actually comes from a stream or our prepackaged food may actually have been grown in this thing called soil.

Around the world, small farmers, desperate to feed their families, are forced to cut down large areas of forested land, clearing it for farming or to sell as fuel wood. The resulting erosion and loss of soil fertility leaves entire hillsides desolate and barren, entrenching poor farmers in a vicious cycle of poverty and deforestation.

For these desperate farmers, their environmental impact is literally drying up the streams that sustain them, eroding the hillsides they farm for sustenance, and threatening their very survival. Now. Not in twenty years when more ice caps melt and sea levels rise, but now.

We all know trees play an important part in reducing global warming, absorbing harmful CO2 and releasing life-giving oxygen, but the full benefits of trees go much deeper. Trees’ root systems provide living barriers that prevent soil erosion, replenish the water table, and restore desolate, unproductive lands.

To the affluent city-dweller, these may sound like fringe benefits, but to a rural farmer, completely dependent on the land for survival, a tree can be the difference between life and death, the difference between hope and despair, thriving and barely squeaking by, a better future for their children and a life entrenched in a vicious cycle of extreme poverty and hunger.

When trees are planted alongside crops-a technique called agroforestry-farmers experience all the benefits of trees while also providing nutritious foods and a sustainable income for their families. For example, Floresta works with farmers to utilize agroforestry and sustainable farming techniques, empowering them to overcome poverty, provide for their families, live in dignity, and fulfill their greatest dream of all-leaving the world a better place for their children.

So for me, the excitement of planting trees results when I can see how caring for the environment actually improves the lives of the rural poor: it’s fighting global warming plus reducing poverty plus restoring environments plus transforming lives. All while leaving the world a better place for our own children as well.

For those hungry to reduce their carbon footprint and do something to alleviate poverty in the world, remember that offsetting our own carbon footprint by planting trees can actually transform the life of a rural farmer. Today.

So plant a tree and transform a life.