The Pursuit of Peace:

Growing Gardens in Dry Season

Abuol Bol Kuol tends to rows in one of ten demonstration gardens established by Mercy Corps in the Abyei area. Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

Nainai village, Abyei area, Sudan — Visiting this village's demonstration garden requires high-stepping over a sharp bramble meant to keep out hungry rabbits. The line of thorn-tree branches runs along three sides of roughly two verdant acres of onion, okra, radish, tomato and cucumber beds; the fourth side is bordered by a small stream.

A Mercy Corps backhoe had just finished scraping away a sizeable chunk of earth between the waterway and the middle of the garden, allowing the vegetables to be more easily irrigated. It was February — the height of dry season — and there hadn't been rain in months.

"We did not plant in dry season before this," said Nyanwiou Dau, one of several middle-aged women tending the garden when we arrived. But thanks to the heavy machinery, foot-powered water pumps and other inputs supplied by Mercy Corps, Nainai's household food production is no longer reliant on rainfall.

Abyei is a border region between northern and southern Sudan that was heavily impacted by the country's 21-year civil war, which ended in 2005. An estimated 85 percent of the area's population fled, and those who remained eked out a hand-to-mouth existence. Many families who have since returned rely on handouts of sorghum, lentils, salt and oil from the UN World Food Program. And many are hard-pressed to supplement that diet with vegetables from the market.

Mercy Corps is helping alleviate the area's food insecurity by building ten demonstration gardens in and around Abyei town. Each is meant to be a kind of "farmer field school," explains Augustine Sowa, livelihoods manager for the Mercy Corps-led Abyei Recovery and Rehabilitation Project, and a way to promote community cohesion in a place experiencing breakneck population growth.

The agency is also digging and stocking several tilapia ponds, and seeding tree nurseries at each site that add both another potential income opportunity and a way to mitigate the deforestation that has accompanied the influx of returnees.

At each demonstration garden Mercy Corps provides seeds, tools and technical advice — but not too much advice, warned Augustine, an agricultural-development expert from Sierra Leone.

"We don't want to radically overhaul their current system." He pointed out some inefficiently shaped onion plots, as well as rows of tomatoes running parallel to the slope rather than perpendicular to it, creating a gutter-like effect that resulted in pooled water on one end of the rows. "We allow them to make mistakes so we can all learn from it," Augustine explained, "and because the result will be sustainable."

Nainai's garden is already helping sustain the 46 families who help farm it. Planted in January 2007, the garden produced a bumper crop of tomatoes last year. Each family got about 30 pounds worth, and another seven pounds were sold on the market.

"These vegetables are rich with vitamins," sayid Nyanwiou, a 42-year-old with three children. "It will help us meet our families' nutritional needs, and if there is enough, it will be a source of income for us."

In the future, she said, the women want to enlarge the garden, plant fruit trees across the road and erect "a modern fence" to make the garden truly rabbit-proof. After years of want, no one can blame families here for wanting to keep all the fresh vegetables for themselves.