Sustainably improving the living conditions of disadvantaged children in Belarus and India and Ireland.
Providing and promoting play for children recovering from major disasters.
It's funny but if a 15-year-old Belarusian boy with downs hadn't gotten it into his head that playing with matches was a good idea I might never have started the farm project and four orphanages in Belarus would either have no farm or a very poor one. This picture is from last year at the time of the first harvest from one of those new farms at Beshankovichi Orphanage in northern Belarus.
The thing is that the 15-year-old wasn't even an orphan. He lived with his grandmother, a 65-year-old partially-sighted woman in a two-bedroom house near Grosovo orphanage, which is near Slutsk, in the south of the country. Their income was her state pension. Unlike in Russia and many of the former soviet states the authorities in Belarus never stopped paying old-age pensions but it was still a meagre amount.
It's the stuff of a Russian tragedy. One night he started playing with matches and a few hours later the little house his grandmother had lived in all her life was nothing more that a charred chimney stack on a blackened site. Fortunately for the babushka and her ward her son lived across the small path which separated two rows of houses which made up the small hamlet. I call it a hamlet because it was much smaller than a village and had only one facility, a small shop which sold Belarusian beer, simple groceries and, if you brought your own container, vegetable oil.
She was indeed fortunate that her son lived across the road. Less fortunate however was that fact that he was an alcoholic. Alcoholism is a major problem in all former soviet states. Drinking is as much part of the culture in the former USSR as it is in Ireland, although you might substitute vodka for Guinness, Heineken and, if you felt like nodding in the direction of modern Ireland, Beaujolais. I
I arrived in Grosovo the day after the night of the fire. I was there on what was only my third trip to Belarus. I was travelling under the auspices of a Waterford-based group called Chernobyl Aid Ireland (CAI).
Our Babushka might have been unfortunate in the predilections of her son but fate decided that her house should burn down at a time at a time when 65 Irish people were renovating the orphanage up the road. A squad of Irish army sergeants from he Curragh had set up an improvised mess in a corner of the gym which served as accommodation for the Irish group got on the job. By 10am on the morning after the fire they'd found out that second hand house of the type our Babushka lived in could be obtained for about $240.
So a sign was put up in the gym asking each volunteer to contribute $20 to buy a new house. It was big sign which allowed the sergeants to put up the names of everybody who had contributed. One might question a strategy which shamed everybody into contributing. Knowing the group I think everyone would have contributed in any case. But it worked, and by the end of the day they had the money for a house.
A house was identified which was almost identical to the house which had burned down. The clever thing was that the sergeants did not seek to have the babushka move to her new home. Instead they arranged to have the house dismantled and moved to the site of her old home.
The thinking behind this was that this old lady and her grandchild would continue to live near the support structure of her neighbours and family. The fact was that this lady, like most people in rural Belarus had a one-acre plot of land which was used to grow potatoes. There is a great tradition of helping one's neighbours in Belarus and it is this tradition which saw her neighbours and on a sporadic basis, her son do the planting and harvesting which ensured that she and her grandson had sufficient potatoes to last the year.
No matter how bad the harvest farmers know that you have to save some of the smaller potatoes to seed the next year's crop. These seed potatoes are traditionally stored in the cellar which lies beneath even the most basic of rural Belarusian homes.
This is where I came in. At the time I was travelling with a friend a fellow journalist called David Murphy. David is now the business correspondent for RTE but at the time worked for the business section of the Irish Independent. This was David's first trip and the two of us put our heads together to try to figure out a way to help. It didn't take us long to decide that we should buy this damsel in distress new seed potato.
The cost was not prohibitive. A few enquiries established that replacing the seed potato would only cost $10. So you can see why it didn't take us long to come to a decision. We had £500 with us, a contribution from the head of a PR agency who, very quietly, wanted to help. He gave the cheque without fanfare and thus became my first sponsor.
We could have just bought the seed potato but instead started asking technical questions about different types of potato being used in the region to make sure that we were buying the best potato possible.
It came down to this. The potato she was using was of the most basic type which the year before had produced a yield of three to one. This is not a good yield and there were many reasons for this. Any farmer will tell you that you can't use the same potato stock over and over again without a dramatic reduction in yield. Nor should you use the same plot of land for the same crop type continuously without expecting to suffer similar consequences.
There were other reasons for the poor yield, such as the fact that that our babushka could not afford the chemical which are needed to keep blight, mildew and Colorado beetle away.
But we had a focus and it was the orphans up the road. Our task here was a hit and run exercise and we agreed that we should get the best seed possible.
Belarus has a system of collective farms which has continued since soviet times. We checked with a number of Irish experts, including agricultural consultants who had spent time in both Russian and Belarusian farms. They told us that the Belarusian farms had some of the best know-how in the world and so we went is search of their advice.
One such farm was experimenting with imported Dutch seed and had a stock to hand. For $100 we could get the best seed available and so this is what we bought.
From my point of view this is where the old lady's story ended. As I said we had a focus and having bought the seed she needed and having delivered it to her personally we left her in the care of her family and neighbours.
But we learned a lesson. A small investment in seed potato could yield very significant improvements in a crop. A walk around the Grosovo farm showed that it was suffering from all of the same problems encountered by our old lady. So we set up a pilot project, spending a further $100 on enough Dutch seed for an acre of the orphanage farm.
That project developed until we had replaced all of the orphanage farm machinery, gotten the local collective to update their farming methods, paid for the chemicals they needed in their first year and built a new vegetable store. That farm renovation is another story but for now you might settle for the happy ending. A few years later the farm was such a success that the state designated Grosovo as an agricultural institute and put in the resources which allow the orphans to learn how to farm.
