Sowing Sustainable Futures
A Women’s Group-supported scholar raises crops in rural Japan in hopes of raising her African homeland out of poverty.
On a crisp December morning, Jenneh Korlison walks down the neat rows of a vegetable garden. Her booted feet sink into the black soil as soft as a Persian carpet.
Korlison, who sowed the field in rural Tochigi Prefecture alongside students from India, Indonesia and Bangladesh, points to a head of broccoli the size of a soccer ball.
“I wanted to come to Japan to learn about organic farming,” says the Liberian. “Sustainable agriculture is the best way to help my community improve.”
The Women’s Group sponsored Korlison’s participation at the Asian Rural Institute’s nine-month program with a ¥1 million scholarship. Korlison, 30, experimented with fish amino acid fertilizer, grew rice, fed pigs, tracked production and wrote reports.
“We weed by hand back home and just throw away the weeds,” says Korlison, adding that heavy chemical use has damaged Liberia’s soil. “Now I know to throw the weeds in a compost pile.”
Every year, about 30 volunteer leaders from rural communities are taught organic farming skills at the nonprofit organization, which was founded more than 40 years ago.
The institute’s Kathy Froede is sitting in the farm’s canteen, which was rebuilt after several buildings were damaged in 2011’s devastating Tohoku earthquake. Lunch ingredients are sourced from the farm, and today’s vegetable samosas are cooked on stoves heated by pig-produced methane gas.
“We want to train people who can train other people to do life better,” says Froede, as guitar players pluck away from opposite ends of the cafeteria. “We consider ourselves a leadership training school that uses agriculture to teach leadership.”
Born during a civil war, Korlison and her family survived a second civil war when the former president, Charles Taylor, was overthrown in 2003. The subsistence farming family moved from town to town to escape violence. Korlison shared one bedroom with six brothers and sisters. Some days, there was no food.
She earned a scholarship to study agriculture at the University of Liberia. Besides teaching high school, she trains more than 2,700 women at a local women’s organization as a volunteer.
An institute alum familiar with Korlison’s group recommended she apply to the program. Korlison was selected from around 100 applicants, with her tuition supported by the Women’s Group and St Timothy’s Church in Tokyo.
“We chose Jenneh because of her experience as a women’s empowerment leader and for her passion to help her country emerge from hardship,” says Tomomi Fujita, the Women’s Group’s director of charity programs.
A week before graduation from the institute, Korlison stands outside a chicken coop where she experimented with kerosene-heated incubation for chicks. In addition to providing meat and eggs, the chickens’ manure is used for fertilizer and the egg shells for animal feed.
Back home, Korlison will teach sustainable practices to women. The long-term goal is to set up a training center and cooperative to sell produce.
“It is not only me that [the Women’s Group] helped,” says Korlison. “The entire community is going to benefit.”
Women’s Group 2018 charitable donations
Words: Nick Narigon
Image: Kayo Yamawaki
