Tiniguena: this land is ours
Guinea Bissau is a small country compared to its neighbours, Senegal to the north and Guinea to the south. By conventional economic indicators, Guinea Bissau is also a poor country, one of the ten poorest in the world. And Guinea Bissau is among the countries of the world that have experienced the crippling legacy of colonialism and the senseless destruction and loss of human life and security through civil war.
These are some of the important facts about this small West African country. But, to the almost 1.5 million people who call Guinea Bissau home it is, of course, not the whole story. The people of Guinea Bissau live on fertile land along a coastline that has some of the richest marine life in the world. For centuries people have lived in villages along this part of Africa's Atlantic coast, raising children, building houses, farming, fishing, celebrating and mourning. They know their land and the sea as well as they know their own families. For these people, as well as their urban compatriots, including the young people who have come of age in the wake of civil war, Guinea Bissau is where their future must be made. It is the ground on which they stand: to survive, to dream and to be a part of the larger world. The Guinean organization, Tiniguena - essa terra e nossa (this land is ours) has been working with rural and urban communities for over ten years to strengthen people's efforts to conserve environmental resources and to control their use for the benefit of those who live there. This assistance includes technical advice, credit for community building projects for schools, health centres and seed storage, and support for women's associations. It also involves assistance in documenting fishing practices and acquiring land title to protect indigenous residents from expropriation.
What Tiniguena is especially known and valued for is the way in which it has linked rural and urban youth through annual exchanges and educational campaigns. Through Tiniguena's programs, young people learn about the challenges facing the country and develop their ability to respond to those challenges. Former participants of the annual exchange program recently formed their own organization, The New Generation of Tiniguena (NGT). NGT organizes cultural festivals and continuing education classes, produces radio programs, and raises money among students in the city to support rural primary schools. During a recent meeting to plan activities for the coming year, the young leaders of NGT told the Tiniguena staff, "We know you have been working hard and you are tired, but hold on a little longer, because we are coming. Guinea Bissau is our home and we will be ready to take on the challenge of making a better future here."
Inter Pares has been honoured to support the work of Tiniguena since it began over a decade ago. And we look forward to a future of learning and working with Tiniguena's new generation.
In Bangladesh's remote northern district of Kurigram, thousands of poor villagers live and farm on islands of sand. Called "charland" by locals, these sand masses, sometimes up to ten square kilometres, appear and disappear with the yearly floods. Despite the marginal fertility of the soil, when islands appear in the dry season they are claimed by distant powerful landowners. In exchange for a percentage of their crops, the island people, as they call themselves, are given permission to farm the dunes. For generations they have worked the loose soil, growing mostly peanuts and rice - never knowing if the next rains will break apart the land beneath their feet, sending them on to another island to begin anew.
Inter Pares and UBINIG, our long time counterpart, are working together with these and other rural Bangladeshi communities through Nayakrishi Andolon (New Agriculture Movement). Nayakrishi is a chemical-free ecological agricultural system based on the use of organic fertilizer, mixed cropping, and the natural pest-deterrent qualities of local varieties of plants and trees, instead of costly and harmful chemical-based farming methods.
Nayakrishi Andolon has allowed new crops to flourish in the charland communities. Wild spinach, a nutritious uncultivated plant, has returned to fields where chemicals are no longer used. The yellow flowers of oil-producing mustard plants can be seen amongst the rice paddies. And local women are tending community seed-wealth huts where farmers receive and exchange ecologically appropriate varieties of rice and vegetable seeds. Villagers say that productivity has gone up, the incidence of pesticide poisoning and other illnesses has gone down, and the food has become tastier. In an area where loose sandy soil easily washes away with the rains, the deep roots and mixed cropping methods of the Nayakrishi farms make, quite literally, for more solid ground on which to build for the future.
| Reviewed June 1, 2004 |  |
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