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   Norma Llanos de Ruiz has been eagerly anticipating the arrival of an engineer from the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Waiting with her at Calala, a remote settlement in the Bolivian tablelands, are 14 other local women. Twenty-two year old Norma heads their group and is one of its few members who speaks Spanish in addition to the regional dialect, Quechua.When Yeric Peric, the local manager of an FAO post-harvest project, appears, the women greet him with a cup of the locally fermented maize drink, chicha. He is here to install a grain mill and silo that will make it easier for them to have food in the future. Without the mill, each woman used to spend two to three hours every day grinding wheat and maize between two stones to get enough flour for her family. Now, according to Norma, who has just watched a demonstration of how to handle and maintain the new mill, this time will be shortened dramatically. "It will take less than fifteen minutes to grind enough grain for all of us," she says. In the past, the women of Calala were not only worried about how much grain they could harvest, but also about how much of it they would lose in storage. Traditionally these women stored the grain in a loft above the fireplace in their kitchens, where the smoke helped to keep it free from pests. But this system was not very effective -- every year a big part of the harvest was lost to rats and other pests. The new silo will preserve an extra 20 to 40 percent of their annual harvest. This means that up to 36,500 additional kilos of wheat can be preserved in Norma's region each year, providing enough food for 500 to 600 more families. It also means that the grain will be cleaner and healthier. "It is amazing to see the immense impact that simple technologies can have on the daily life of the farmers," says Yeric, after installing the machines. "We can already see development in these communities. The children tend to get less sick, and nutrition is improving." The grain mills and silos are being distributed through TeleFood, an annual FAO campaign to raise awareness and funds to increase the supply of food in developing communities. Since its inception in 1997, the TeleFood initiative has sponsored 900 grassroots projects in more than 100 countries, for which it has raised almost $8 million through concerts, sporting events, fund-raising dinners, auctions and television and radio programmes. In eight months, the TeleFood program has set up 600 silos and 20 grain mills in Norma's region of Bolivia. TeleFood has paid for the materials, but the local people have paid for labour costs. At $9 per silo and $125 per grain mill, this has been no small sum in villages with minimal cash economies. The women in Calala have been saving for a long time to buy their silo and mill, which they are confident will be worth the expense. "We are very happy. With the silo we can save our harvest, and the mill will help us save time," says Norma. Though this mill and silo are the first and only ones in Calala, women here dream of getting individual ones some day, and possibly even a threshing machine. FIND OUT MORE about how the UN supports projects and programmes that give people like Norma a chance to build more prosperous lives for themselves, their families and their communities. Click on the links next to Norma. ADDITIONAL DEVELOPMENT STORIES: Sarah enjoys clean water Thèrèse has a business plan | Armando makes a choice |
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