Dancing Farmers
David’s 2nd Photo Blog from Malawi
Dear Family,
I’d be willing to bet that something Jesus said in His Sermon on the Mount has very little relevance to most everyone who is reading this blog. Here it is:
Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink (Matt. 6:25).
The only time in my life I’ve ever worried about having nothing to drink was when I ran out of water once while temporarily lost in the Sahara desert during a nighttime hike to a village. I’ve been hungry many times, of course, but I’ve never worried that I would not soon be eating.
There are, however, millions of people in the world who regularly face food insecurity, and most of them live in rural Africa. All are subsistence farmers, and their lives depend on successful and sufficient harvests. When you can’t grow enough food to feed your family until next year’s harvest, you are naturally tempted to worry. Farming God’s Way (FGW) puts an end to such worries. Farmers who put the FGW methods into practice are soon able to grow more than their families consume, which means they can sell and share their excess. Their lives change dramatically, and they continue to improve every year as their soil improves.
Over the course of the past few days, we’ve met, in various places, with about 200 Malawian farmers who have been trained by our Farming God’s Way trainers. All are members of the God’s Love Groups that I mentioned in my first blog. When we’ve arrived at their gathering places, they and their children have met us with African singing and dancing. When they testify of how their lives have changed, they are smiling from ear to ear. If you will click on the photo below, you will see a very emotional video of a FGW farmer who, after leading other FGW farmers in a song of rejoicing, tells his story in his native language. It doesn’t need any translation. Clearly, he and his fellow FGW farmers are no longer worrying about food!
Dick Samuels, who directs Heaven’s Family’s Farming God’s Way Ministry, told me about an incident that occurred when he visited Malawi a few years ago, during the very first FGW harvest among our initial 30 farmers. An elderly man took Dick into his humble mud house to show him the bags of maize he’d just stored there after the harvest. He said to Dick, “Young man [Dick was about 70 at the time], do you know what it means to be rich?” Dick said, “Please tell me.” The old man replied, “It is to have enough food to feed your family for an entire year, all the way up to next year’s harvest. For the first time in my life, I am rich.”
These days in Malawi, our Malawian FGW trainers are in various stages of training about 1,000 farmers who regularly meet in 65 God’s Love Groups (GLGs). Beyond that, our FGW trainers in Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Uganda are together training hundreds of additional farmers and catching the vision of facilitating the ongoing training and discipleship through God’s Love Groups, and all on a shoestring budget.
A few photos below. (But make sure you watch the video above!)
More good news in my next blog…