CELL Service-Learning with Sustainable Harvest Honduras

During our last week in Honduras, CELL is partnering with Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) and their local affiliate Sustainable Harvest Honduras. SHI helps rural families become economically and environmentally sustainable. This community based organization was founded by Florence Reed (¨Flo¨), a former Peace Corps volunteer who had a vision of empowering poor families in Central America to improve their incomes and quality of life while preserving and restoring their local environment. Throughout our semester program, we have seen inspiring examples of people like Flo and the amazing things they are doing when they commit their lives to following their passion.

Currently Sustainable Harvest Honduras works with 548 families in 42 communities in the mountain districts of Santa Barbara and Yoro. Many poor families still practice slash and burn techniques to clear their land and grow crops. After two years, however, the land suffers from severe erosion (without trees and other vegetation to hold the soil) and loss of soil productivity. SHI teaches families, through community extension agents, how to turn their marginally productive soil into a fertile environment for growing crops by using compost, permaculture, and organic practices. SHI recognizes that in order for an environmental program to be successful, people´s economic needs have to also be taken into consideration (i.e. people need to have viable ways to earn an income while protecting their environment).

One family, for example, increased their annual income from their land from $80 to over $1,000 when they switched to organic farming practices. SHI works with families for five years training them in sustainable practices. Once a family graduates, they are then able to provide for themselves as well as teach their neighbors what they have learned. In this way, families not only learn valuable skills, increase their incomes, and protect their environment; they also gain something equally important - the self-respect and dignity that come from helping others.

SHI helps families with all aspects of sustainability from reforestation to small integrated fish farms, from composting to making organic pesticides and fertilizers, etc. The following program descriptions will give you a flavor of the work SHI is doing in Honduras (examples borrowed from SHI´s 2007 Annual Report).

Feed the Future: Organic Vegetable Gardens

Proper nutrition is essential to good health, especially with children. Unfortunately, many children living in Central America are malnourished due to a lack of vital nutrients in their diets. These children live in places where most of the families fall below the poverty level. Fruits and vegetables are considered luxuries that only the wealthy can afford. In fact, many of the villages where SHI works, over 75% of the families have never had access to even the most basic garden vegetables such as tomatoes and carrots. SHI provides seeds, training, and support to families desperate to grow nourishing produce to sustain themselves. Now, over 90% of the families working with SHI have planted organic gardens. Not only are the children getting the nutrition they need, the families are experiencing increased income as they are now able to sell excess produce to markets and to their neighbors.

Wood-Conserving Stoves


Imagine breathing in smoke fumes equivalent to smoking eight packs of cigarettes per day, every day. In Honduras, women and children were breathing in that much smoke daily just from the open fireplaces they used for cooking and heating. Now, with help from SHI, hundreds of families are being taught how to build and use simple Lorena stoves, which use chimneys to channel the smoke outside rather than into the room. In addition to improving the air quality in a home, the stoves are beneficial because they are constructed mostly of local materials, are easy to build, and reduce firewood useage by half. These stove are greatly improving the lives of many families throughout Central America.


We are having an amazing week working alongside local families building wood-conserving stoves, creating organic gardens, building low-maintenance chicken coops, and living in homestays in rural villages. We are learning how one person, one family, and one village can make a big difference when they work together in community to achieve a common goal called sustainability! For more information on SHI, you can check out their website at http://www.sustinableharvest.org/.


If you think you are too small to make a difference, try going to sleep with a mosquito in the room. (Gandhi)

Below are several student reflections on our time with SHI.

Sarah: This week our CELL group traveled to the barrios of Ocatal, a new SHI project village. We have worked on three different projects at five different homes in the first two days. When I first arrived, I was taken to my homestay and greeted by Dona Maria. She is a short and somewhat timid woman in her mid 60s, but she has a wonderful warm smile and is very sweet. Her husband, Don Mercedes, is an energetic and friendly man always making sure that we have everything we need. I have felt very much at home with their loving hospitality.

The first day we worked at Don Antonio´s house making a fence for the garden, digging up the soil, making raised beds, and planting carrots and radishes. We worked alongside Don Antonio and Herman, the agricultural extension agent from SHI. Don Antonio showed us around his house -excitedly pointing out the different plants and animals and showing us the mango trees recently planted. As we worked, we talked with Herman and Don Antonio, and they explained the working of the garden and showed us how to use ash, pine needles, and rich compost to create soil for plant growth. During our hours there, more family members and children appeared to watch and see what was going on. They peered around posts and slowly came closer to watch and then scurry back when you smiled at them. After we finished planting the seeds, Don Antonio smiled and seemed pleased with his new garden.

It was empowering to see SHI´s work in action and how they are helping people to help themselves and their environment. SHI really focuses on the community and educating people so that they can live healthier, happier, and more sustainable lives. I really believe that this community support, knowledge, and connectedness is what makes sustainability possible. By working diligently and closely with families and commmunities, SHI is building the basis and potential for a sustainable future.

Dave T: Sustainable Harvest is a great NGO helping families and communities here in Honduras. They hire community members (agricultural extension workers) even though they don´t have university degrees. Even though they may not have a degree, they have something much more important, they know how to speak to and teach members in their community, they know how to use the local materials, and they know what works in these conditions. When they (SHI) go into a community, they set up a meeting and see what the community has, what they do, then they see who wants to work with them. They let the communities know that there are no free handouts, but that they will provide help to families that want to help themselves. Their big project seems to be community gardens so families can have plants to give them the vitamins they are not getting from corn and beans.

Another big project for SHI is building efficient stoves with chimneys. This allows the family to burn less wood, but more importantly, the health benefits are enormous with the smoke leaving the home. This works together with another project, reforestation: planting fruit trees and other trees to help conserve water and regulate temperature/climate in these communities.

I think SHI is doing a great job here working on sustainability. They realize that one can´t have an environmental program without taking people´s needs into account because without meeting the needs of people, environmental degradation would continue. By providing education, they are showing people that they don´t have to slash and burn to grow crops, how to increase nutrition and improve health, and how to look holistically at a community´s needs.

Jonas: Sustainable Harvest seems like a wonderful organization to me. One of the things I really like is how much they have focused on new, more efficient ovens and stoves which use less firewood and vent smoke outside. This helps solve health problems while also saving the family from collecting so much firewood. On our first day here, Greg and I worked with Dona Maria to build a family garden. I really like the way SHI allows us to help the family build the garden right alongside them. That way everybody is involved and everybody gets to learn how the process works. I also really like how we are able to live with the people in the community because it allows for a much richer experience. Just like with Grupo Fenix (a program we spent a month with in Nicaragua), I feel more deeply connected with this program simply because we get to live in the homes and don´t simply stay for a couple of hours and then leave. Once a community project is started, SHI´s first goal is to work with the family on an initial project such as building a garden. In this way, both SHI and the family build trust. Then, after that, the family is more likely to listen to the suggestions of SHI, such as not using slash and burn techniques, something which is hard for them to understand because they have been doing it for so long.