Liberia: Round 2!

Recap:

I’m Natalia Povelite, a second-generation commercial fisherman. I’m 24, originally from Kodiak, Alaska, and I like adventures.

I’m in Liberia again, assisting the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute’s (ASMI) Alaska Global Food Aid Program (AGFAP), at the request of the ASMI AGFAP’s Director,  Bruce Schactler. The State of Alaska donated over 60,000 cans of herring to Samaritan’s Purse, an international aid organization, which distributed the herring to local people participating in their programs. Recipients tasted the herring for the first time 9 months ago, and have been receiving it ever since. I am here with Nicole Coglianese, a Nutritionist from ASMI AGFAP’s Washington DC based food aid & nutrition consulting group, Global Food & Nutrition, to see how this pilot project is going and to meet some of the people who have been eating the Alaska herring.

Foya, Liberia
January 28, 2013
Karpie and Kimbaloe CLP (Church-based Livelihoods Program)

Nicole and I arrived in Liberia last night and hopped on a Samaritan’s Purse (SP) helicopter this morning for a flight to SP’s base in Foya, a rural town in the northwestern corner of Liberia.
After watching the massive orange tropical sun rise to bring the daily heat (it's ninety-something degrees here), we glided over the green and lush countryside for over an hour, low enough to smell the smoke from people’s fires burning below us. The landscape changed from low and coastal to hilly and green, a sea of trees cut sometimes by red dirt roads, rivers, crops, and small houses.

Once in Foya, we drove a small distance to one of the sites of the herring donation, the Church-based Livelihoods Program (CLP). This program is essentially a night school for local people of the villages of Karpie and Kimbaloe (pronounced Kappy and Kimbaloo). Students, who are mostly women, learn to write their names and learn English. Monju, the program’s coordinator, explained that men are typically in the forefront of development, and though there are male students too, this program was intended to empower women specifically, as Liberia continues along its path of development. Liberia's illiteracy rate is 80 percent, so this program is incredibly empowering to these communities.

The recipients of the herring welcomed us graciously when we arrived, singing and clapping a
welcome song. Nicole spoke one-on-one with women who had received herring, while I observed and photographed Monju distributing the cans of fish to women.

Afterwards, people filled the classroom and we were warmly thanked by some of the herring recipients, as well as a local chief. ("I am the father of these people," he said.)

People were genuinely grateful and thankful for receiving the herring and many wished that we could provide more to them. As Monju explained to me, though fish is available on the coast, it goes bad by the time it reaches this area because there is no good way to preserve it. This herring is rich in high quality marine protein and Omega-3 fatty acids, and a welcome tasty addition to people’s diets. It was pretty incredible to see people in this remote and (to me) foreign corner of the world taking home cans of herring caught in cold Alaskan waters. In some ways, this place could not be more different from Alaska, yet people here are able to benefit from the wild fish caught there.

                                                              CLP students with their herring.

                                                 View from the chopper, just outside of Monrovia.

I’m more than excited to visit other program sites tomorrow and to see who else has been eating Alaskan fish over the last nine months!