Hello everyone!
My name is Laura Kahn, and I’m very happy to have re-joined WVI recently as the Director. I’ve been traveling for the past year, first with the Obama Campaign, and then teaching abroad in the Middle East. It was a great year, and educational in many ways. One of the things I realized while traveling was how important WVI’s work is. Working on the Obama Campaign and teaching in the Middle East were very different, but they both reiterated the need to be building a world founded on reasonable expectations and sustainable progress. From the foreclosed-upon homeowners in Nevada to the Syrian veterans I was teaching, everyone I spoke to recognized that the global situation has become untenable. We have to find a more rational, sustainable way of life, and it was gratifying to feel that WVI has been on the right track the whole time. I felt a bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz; after traveling the whole world wide, I found there’s really no place like home! I’m thrilled to be back in Maine and working again on the most relevant and important work I can find.
Spring always brings a lot of growth to WVI, and this spring has been one of unprecedented expansion. Since January, our amazing staff in Congo have harvested the largest amount of rice any producer has ever grown in the Ruzizi Valley, bringing in an astonishing 100,000 pounds of rice each month. Interestingly, this has presented a challenge to the Ruzizi Project in the form of storage space. The first barn we refurbished has already been filled, and we’re now racing against the clock to raise the money to build more storage space before our record harvests are damaged by the elements.
This spring has also seen the fruition of a rice-buying program which has changed the lives of 27,000 farmers in the surrounding areas. Prior to our program, the local small farmers had no way of hulling their rice crop, and had been forced to sell their rice unhulled to war profiteers at far below the market price. The profiteers would then hull the rice, hold it until the market was desperate for rice, and then sell it at an enormous profit, forcing both the farmers and the local villagers deeper into poverty. We obtained a rice huller last fall, and since then have managed to start a rice-buying program, paying the farmers over twice what they received from the profiteers. We buy 160 tons of rice each month from the outlying farmers, and sell it at a fair market price to the people of the Ruzizi Valley. This program is proving extraordinarily successful, and has helped to empower the larger Ruzizi community to work for peace and independence.
The other big news around here is that WVI’s founder and President, Alexander Petroff, was chosen as a TEDGlobal Fellow 2009, and will be speaking at the TEDGlobal 2009 Conference in Oxford. TED is a remarkable international community of thinkers and entrepreneurs, and we’re thrilled to be part of this innovative global fellowship.
I’ll keep you posted as seeds take root and grow here at WVI. Our next trip to Congo is coming up, and we’re looking forward to the amazing challenges and opportunities that always await us at the Ruzizi Project. If you’d like to get our newsletter, sign up in the box in the left column, or feel free to email me with any questions at. I look forward to hearing from you!
Best,
Laura