During the weekend of 6th and 7th April we were delighted to welcome Emma Lynch the CHURCH AND SUPPORTER RELATIONS CO-ORDINATOR for Tearfund Ireland and their Ethiopian colleagues Mulugeta and Genet.
On Saturday Genet showed us the traditional coffee ceremony from Ethiopia, the origin of the coffee plant. Despite some excitement due to the smoke from the roasting of the coffee beans testing the fire alarms within the building; beautiful coffee, popcorn and roasted barley was shared by all.
Mulugeta explained about the purposes of the self help groups, from an Irish perspective some of the ideas are akin to the development of co-operative societies here in the 1950s. In Ethiopia a group of people usually the poorest of the poor in a community, join together, agree on a name, meet regularly with each member in turn chairing the meeting, record their savings into a passbook, on a consensus basis agree on who to loan money to and at what interest rate, each decision taken is written down. These loans help buy goats, enable women to buy flour more cheaply by getting it in bulk, hence bread is baked which can be sold and avoid the problems with debt to moneylenders. The effects of these self help groups on their members are not only financial but they also promote self confidence and give a voice to those who had none before. Membership of the groups is open to all different faiths and none. Christians, Muslims and others join together which promotes awareness and tolerance across the different communities. They also improve the literacy and numeracy of the adults and their children.
Tearfund Ireland is also working with communities in Ethiopia to promote and educate farmers about agricultural methods to deal with the effects of climate change and showed some pictures where one farmer used it on half of his field and used traditional methods on the other half. The improvement due to the new methods was enormous, stunted maize plants on one side vibrant tall maize on the other side. In essence the basic idea is layering green mulch on the soil to retain moisture during the growing season. Sadly when environmental pressure strikes communities often trees are harvested as a short term solution but this generally leads to greater soil erosion and flash flooding due to the loss of the trees. They are working to share knowledge within the communities.
On Sunday during a whistle stop visit at each of the the three churches, Mulugata was able to give a flavour of the work done by TearFund Ireland in Ethiopia. In each of the churches there was a presentation of a picture.
