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More than a hundred passengers from the Mennonite Heritage Cruise took time out from exploring historic sites in Ukraine to see a current initiative that is helping local farmers, some of them tilling land once owned by Mennonites. In early October the passengers visited clients of the Ukraine Horticultural Development Project (UHDP) being carried out by Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA). The five-year $10 million project, supported by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), aims to help 5,000 smallholder farmers create successful ventures on former collectivized farms. While the project is not directly related to the Mennonite Heritage Cruise, both share roots in the historic region. Since 1995 the annual cruise has given more than 3,000 visitors a chance to travel the Dnieper River and immerse themselves in the history of Mennonites who developed major settlements in Ukraine and Crimea from 1789 until after the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 20th century. More recently, cruise organizers have included special visits to local service efforts supported by Mennonites. This year they invited staff of MEDA’s Ukraine project to participate in the final cruise, which ran from Sept. 30 to Oct. 16. UHDP field manager Steve Wright and two other staff members joined passengers for several days and escorted more than 100 of them to meet farmer clients and see how MEDA is helping them grow better crops and improve
Photo by Vyachaslav Obozinksi
Cruise ship passengers visit Ukraine farm project marketing. They visited Crimean farmer Roman Pospelovksy, who grows strawberries, cucumbers and tomatoes in his two greenhouses. He explained how technical assistance has helped bolster production and has encouraged him to plan additional crops, such as table grapes. For local Ukrainians, the assistance of MEDA and other Mennonite groups is seen as an act of forgiveness and reconciliation, given that many Mennonites were driven out of the area following the Bolshevik Revolution nearly a century ago. A focal point for today’s Mennonite presence in ancestral regions is the Mennonite Centre in Molochansk (formerly called Halbstadt), housed in a refurbished Mennonite girls school. It grew out of the vision of people who started visiting the area following Ukraine’s independence in the early 1990s, explains George Dyck of Vineland, Ont., a Centre official. “They were amazed by the squalor, poverty and low standard of living in the area, and decided to establish the Centre in 2001 in memory of their ancestors and to help the local people,” he says. The Centre carries on numerous activities, including medical assistance to impoverished pensioners and the handicapped, educational and youth outreach, and informational services about the region and its Mennonite past. Dyck developed a “Mennonite Return and Outreach” theme for the cruise itinerary so that passengers could see the work and institutions served by the Centre and related Mennonite initiatives.
The Marketplace November December 2010
Passengers stream into the greenhouse farm of MEDA client Roman Pospelovsky. Walter Unger of Toronto, the cruise organizer, notes that the return and outreach theme derives from the third of a series of shipboard lectures by historian Paul Toews of Fresno, Calif. The lecture, titled “Paradox and Irony in the Russian Mennonite Story,” ends with a section on “Irony of Rebirth” — how the Mennonites have
returned to Ukraine in various roles. “Toews points out that 20 years ago everyone thought the Mennonite story in Ukraine was dead, gone forever, but not so, remarkably not so,” says Unger. “The recent MEDA initiative graphically shows how Mennonites care about their former neighbors.” ◆
Will cookstoves be the next big thing? First it was malaria nets, then vaccines. Could cooking stoves be the next big player in the business of health? The application of market know-how to a seemingly non-business commodity like insecticide-treated mosquito nets has become the stuff of legend in the development community. The premise (as discovered and promoted by MEDA) is simple — rather than merely give nets away, why not offer them at a discount, making the customer pay a little. That way local retailers can make a buck, giving them an incentive to keep a supply on hand and thus ensuring a steady source 22
for tomorrow’s customer. The ploy has a subtle additional benefit — it taps into the truism that people tend to value something more if they pay for it. Now there is talk of extending the idea to cookstoves, and saving many lives of those who succumb to smoky pollution. “Makeshift cookers also catch fire easily, maiming and killing,” says The Economist. “And lives are not the only things wasted. Women and girls in rural villages lose time and energy walking around collecting dirty solid fuels, ranging from crop waste to cow dung (better used as Continued on page 23
