the common room
’10
KAYLA CORCORAN volunteer
THE VEGETABLES OF THEIR LABOR “We were not going in with answers,” said Kayla Corcoran ’10. “We were going in with a toolkit.” Ms. Corcoran, a junior at Georgetown University, was describing her approach to two months spent last summer in Nkomangwa, in the Eastern Province of Rwanda. Ms. Corcoran traveled there as part of a team from ThinkImpact. ThinkImpact is an education travel program that places college and graduate students in communities in Africa and Latin America to foster asset-based community development, or as Ms. Corcoran said, “a business idea with a social focus.” The goal of the program is not for participants to impose ideas on a community, but for them to listen, to collaborate, and to devise solutions that are workable and empowering. The experience began with two weeks of conversations, as the ThinkImpact participants met with community members, while community leaders translated between English and Kinyarwanda. Ms. Corcoran and her fellow team members heard about the agricultural challenges of the region: Land prices are high. Water is scarce. The weather is hot. Seeds are expensive. All farming is done by hand with machetes and hoes. While certain crops, including plantains, sorghum, maize, and cassava, do well in the hard soil, growing vegetables is a challenge. “What emerged out of this process was a simple idea with incredible potential,” said Ms. Corcoran. She and her team members—from ThinkImpact and the local community— came up with the concept of cultivating “sack gardens,” which have been used in other regions of Africa and in the Middle East with great success. Essentially, a sack garden is an efficient growing environment. “You take a big burlap or plastic sack—and they have a lot of those in Rwanda,” Ms. Corcoran said. A column of rocks surrounded by dirt and fertilizer creates a water-efficient growing environment.
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“Water only releases as necessary,” said Ms. Corcoran. “You don’t have to weed, since you transplant seedlings into the sack.” Sack gardens transform one cubic meter of soil into five square meters of arable farm land. “Costing less than a dollar per bag to start, sack gardens posed a low-risk investment with a high profit potential,” Ms. Corcoran explained. By the end of her two months in Rwanda, Ms. Corcoran and her partner had planted beans to transplant into a small prototype. The local team planned to grow carrots, celery, and onions, when the planting season began shortly after Ms. Corcoran’s departure. The local residents had a name for their efforts: Imbereheza, the Kinyarwanda word for “to have a good vision for the future.” “Imbereheza’s vision is two-fold,” said Ms. Corcoran, “to provide nutrition and food variety for their own families and those of community members, and to use the extra income from the vegetable sales to become seed-independent, so that they are not forced to buy the seed at more expensive prices from outside sellers.” As an English major, minoring in Arabic and history, at Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences, Ms. Corcoran does not have a track record in agricultural studies, let alone innovation. But she does have a strong interest in global issues, which started at Deerfield. “I became fascinated with Rwanda in Mr. (Joe) Lyons’ 20th Century History class that I took during senior year,” said Ms. Corcoran. A trip to India with Round Square also fostered a curiosity about different cultures and a passion for travel; that experience encouraged her to take a gap year at King’s Academy in Jordan. When the email about ThinkImpact came from the Office of International Programs to Ms. Corcoran’s inbox last December, she recalled, “I was intrigued. I’m always looking for the next big adventure.” ••
Alexandra Candill (1 & 3); Charles Smalling (2)
by Lynn Horowitch