The yearly Hunger Season is inevitably upon us again. During the super hot and dry last months of the year, before the rains and planting of the fields, people are lacking good food. They have no ability to store food from one season to another and literally live from hand to mouth… When the temperatures soar to over 40 degrees Celsius, everything that is green or alive seem to wither and die. (In the last few weeks we have recorded temperatures on our veranda of 44 degrees Celsius (110 F)! When it’s so hot that it seems that the very air we breathe is on fire, we marvel that ANYTHING survives here at all.
This is the reason why we have started to build store rooms for the “Josef Project”. For years Francois had the vision of a community cereal bank. The idea at this stage is to be an incentive for subsistence farmers to produce more than what they need for themselves. The Josef Project provide a granary for them to store their crops so that they can wait for better market prices before they sell. The current thought is for them to tithe of the crops they store to the Josef project. Francois would also like to be able to buy other staples like maize/corn, from other areas, that are not grown locally to supplement the local (very limited) diet. Despite not having a special fund for this project, the building is nearly finished! We do need funds however to run the project and ask your specific prayers for that.