Transcript
Luputa is a city of 214,000 people. It is a poor agricultural area. The primary food for people here is cassava. Where we live, cassava is a staple food. The members worked so hard on small plots of land, but the meager harvest stood in no relation to all their work and energy expended. The reality of life here in Kasai is that it is very complicated, but I have to do my best to provide for my family.
There are times when members will leave their homes and walk more than 50 kilometers to find more fertile grounds that will yield a good harvest. After we take the cassava out of the ground and carry it back to Luputa, we have to peel them, clean them, and then put them in water.
Then the cassava is ground into small pieces, then put in a sack and pressed for 48 hours. The final step is drying and grinding it into flour.
The LDS Church has brought us a project and introduced a new variety of cassava that is more productive and has a shorter growing season. The new variety is superior in every way. The new variety can be harvested in 10 to 12 months, whereas the old variety took 18 to 24 months to grow before it could be harvested. The Church has provided a 30 hectare farm and members are working the fields using the new production methods.
We harvest, process the flour, and make it affordable for everyone. We all receive assignments to work in the fields and receive cassava if we are in need.
We harvest, process the flour, and make it affordable for everyone. We already have people who come and buy small 10-kilo sacks of flour.
Through this project and the training from the Church, members have been trained and received a quantity of cassava root stock.
As a mother, I am very proud of this cassava flour. We have enough to eat now and our children are happy.
Our children used to get sick from the cassava. Children even died.
The importance really of this project is that it gave us a solution to a serious problem.
If God is willing, we will prevail.
I feel great joy and love for being the recipient of this help that allows us to overcome this problem. It is a great joy.
I tell you it is difficult to express. We can't see God with our eyes, but we can see God through the acts of this church in our land.