Making porridge

The hospital uses a porridge product that is a combination of corn, sorghum, and soybeans as an energy food. It is fairly healthy and tastes sort of like oatmeal. Or at least, it should have corn, sorghum, and soybeans. Sometimes they make substitutions depending on availability. They used to buy all of the porridge, but decided recently to start producing their own. Their is a program at HEAL to provide grants to women at the hospital and in HEAL programs to start businesses. A field is being purchased now and some of the women's money will go towards working in the field and buying tools and things if they decide they want to do that for their project. The mill we visited on Friday was another option in this operation. Here the grains are brought to be ground (much like a small animal feed mill) and packaged. I uploaded some pictures of the bags of porridge mix (it looks like flower and you cook it like oatmeal) in the HEAL Africa album.

The whole goal of the program is to produce locally things that would normally have to be bought and imported or donated by other organizations. The field is not ready quite yet, but the milling operation got a jump start due to a very interesting happening. The women at the hospital get food from different organizations, and one organization that has been giving food for a long time has always gave beans which is fine. The last shipment of food had lentils in it instead and many of the women at the hospital can't eat them because they bother their stomach. After talking to the organization providing the food it was realized that they were not interested in changing back to the original formula but would continue to provide the lentils because that's what they could get easiest. So there is food available, it's just that people can't eat it and the organization doesn't care. So HEAL stepped up and got the milling facility up and running as soon as possible to provide alternate nutrition for people who can't handle the lentils and provide income generating opportunities to women in HEAL programs.