{"id":956,"date":"2015-12-15T14:35:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-15T20:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/?p=956"},"modified":"2017-07-18T07:38:49","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T13:38:49","slug":"the-miracle-growing-garden-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/?p=956","title":{"rendered":"The Miracle Growing Garden: Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>One of the biggest miracles in my life happened during the closing months of the Sandinista war, while living near the Nicaraguan border in Honduras.\u00a0 The name of the village was Raya, located in the eastern corner of Honduras.\u00a0 Infant mortality was reported to be fifty\u00a0percent; one in two children died before the age of two.\u00a0 Because the Sandinistas had killed all of the local medical professionals, my wife and two other Dutch nurses were the only caregivers.\u00a0 We all lived in one clinic that looked like a jungle style duplex.\u00a0 Many of those children died in our home.<\/p>\n

The reasons for the high infant mortality rate were complicated, but a major contributing factor was malnutrition of the mother before and after birth.\u00a0 The primary foods were rice, black beans, and plantanos (a large hard banana that needs to be boiled to eat.)\u00a0 There were some cows but they were thin and malnourished.\u00a0The sparse grass was poor feed and the vampire bats flocked to the cows at night, which left them anemic. \u00a0Their meat was costly.<\/p>\n

Without any previous experience I decided we needed to teach the Miskito Indians how to garden.\u00a0 They had never seen a vegetable. \u00a0To teach them, I needed to do it myself first.\u00a0 The challenge was to do it in ways that the natives could copy, which meant no fancy equipment, fertilizers, or chemicals.\u00a0 I purchased two books on raised bed gardening and charged five dollars\u2019 worth of gardening equipment on my expense account.\u00a0 I was working for ZOE, an international refuge organization, at the time.\u00a0 I was responsible for sanitation and community\u00a0hygiene.<\/p>\n

I was called into headquarters to explain the five-dollar charge.\u00a0 They said that even though they considered me generally honest the thought of a vegetable garden in the rainforest was so preposterous that the only other possible explanation was theft.\u00a0 I was told that US AID has spent over a million dollars attempting to grow vegetables in the jungle and failed even with US agriculture experts running the program.<\/p>\n

The problem was two-fold.\u00a0 There was no soil.\u00a0 In a rainforest, once the trees are cleared away the rainfall drives the soil in the ground or it all runs away leaving nothing but sand.\u00a0 Where we lived, it rained twelve feet a year.\u00a0 Secondly, even if there was soil the onslaught of the bugs was horrific.\u00a0 They ate the soft vegetation almost as fast as it could grow.\u00a0 Even after hearing the obstacles and scale of the US AID failure I still requested permission to proceed.\u00a0 I sighted several Bible passages about seed-time and harvest. Shaking their heads, they reluctantly gave me a small budget to proceed.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

Building the garden boxes 1989<\/em><\/h5>\n

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I built ten wood frame boxes 4\u2019 x 10\u2019 x 12\u201d and placed a chicken wire fence around them.\u00a0 For three months two men worked eight hour days collecting all of the manure from the livestock.\u00a0 The village was built around a grass landing strip.\u00a0 In the late evening the cattle and horses would drift in from the jungle and sleep on the runway to protect themselves from the jaguars.\u00a0 Then men began collecting the manure left behind every day, plus they started collecting anything organic that was easily accessible, primarily floating aquatic plants like hyacinth.\u00a0 After six months we had composted about one inch of soil in the boxes.\u00a0 It was time to plant.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Composting in Honduras 1989<\/em><\/h5>\n

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One of the biggest miracles in my life happened during the closing months of the Sandinista war, while living near the Nicaraguan border in Honduras.\u00a0 The name of the village was Raya, located in the eastern corner of Honduras.\u00a0 Infant mortality was reported to be fifty\u00a0percent; one in two children died before the age of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,78,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-countries","category-rocks_favs","category-testimonies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1589,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions\/1589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}