Community Gardening Project in Ethiopia

The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk), a popular news agency, recently published a story praising the efforts of local NGO to develol and operate and innovative project to prevent, treat, and care for AIDS and HIV victims. RATSON, the NGO responsible for the plan, has devised a strategy to teach urban gardening to people with HIV.

“We are trying to make it very simple for the community to make an income in a small space,” commented Moges Gorfe, the founder of RATSON. As the plans for community gardening come to fruition, RATSON has big and bigger plans. The Guardian notes, “Gorfe, who says he wants to bring back traditional ties of kinship so that communities work and help one another, has big plans. He wants to build schools that are able to grow their own food so the children can learn about the ecosystem as well as feed themselves. “We can grow moringa trees. They grow fast and produce a vegetable like a cabbage. We can grow pigeon pea, a creeping plant. Put them together, you can build a house. You can build schools with these trees – and then we want the children to eat their schools,” he said, only half-jokingly.”