The Power of Rabbits

The Power of Rabbits  

This is Esther. She lives on a mountain a 3 hour walk from the city of Kabale, where we are located. Esther got married when she was 18 years old to a man 15 years older than her. Over the years she gave birth to five children that she and her husband raised together. But one night not long after the births of her fourth and fifth children (twins), her husband beat her half to death and left her, never to be heard from again. She was taken to the KIHEFO clinic for treatment, where she remained in a coma and in critical condition for days. While she was there, her house was robbed and she lost every single thing she and her children owned. After recovering from her injuries, she returned to her empty home. She had nothing: no bed, no blankets, no food, no water, no money, no husband, no job, and no way to care for her children. But these absences did not break her.

Esther reached out to the KIHEFO organization and was given a job working in the Garden of Prosperity, a shop where single or struggling women make clothing and souvenirs and sell them, receiving a large portion of the sales to keep for themselves. Almost every day Esther wakes up at 5 in the morning and makes the three hour trip on foot to Kabale. She works all day in the shop, and then walks 3 hours back through the town and up the mountain to her home. Through this enormous sacrifice, she is able to provide basic nourishment for her children, and schooling for two of them. The rest cannot afford to go to school, and spend their days working in their garden and hiking up and down the mountain to fetch water from the stream. Despite her efforts, each of her children struggled with malnourishment. The KIHEFO Nutrition Center helped nourish her kids back to health and provide her with the knowledge and tools needed to keep them fed and healthy. Though she sacrifices more than any woman should ever have to for her children, her efforts still did not provide her with everything she needed to raise a happy, healthy, and educated family. But now, thanks to the power of 3 rabbits, she will.

The KIHEFO rabbit program is a self sustainable project funded by students like me. For $300, it is possible to construct a sturdy raised rabbit cage and provide this and 3 rabbits for a family. We get the materials, deliver them to a home, build the cage, deliver the rabbits, and teach the family how to breed them. They eat basically anything green, so it is easy and inexpensive to feed them. One rabbit produces an average of 8 bunnies a month. Rabbits sell here for about 10,000 shillings each. School fees for an entire year are only 30,000 shillings. You can use or sell their urine for pesticide, and use their droppings for mulch. Rabbits are also a great source of nutrition. By providing a family with these rabbits, they can be transported from poverty and starvation to prosperity and health in a manner of months.

The students in my program and I were able to raise the funds to build a rabbit cage for Esther. We hiked the mountain to her house carrying the heavy wooden planks on our shoulders and built a cage using a handsaw, hammers, and nails. The whole process took two days to complete. When we finished and presented Esther with the rabbits, my heart was overcome with gratitude. Gratitude that people like Esther exist and give everything they have and more for their children, gratitude that I was in a position to be able to help them, gratitude for the opportunity to be in Africa and see a side of the world that I had never seen before. Thanks to 3 rabbits, her entire life will now change. After a few months, she won’t need to walk for 6 hours a day to provide for her children. All of her kids will be able to afford school. They can eat the rabbits and afford to buy even more food, saving her kids from malnourishment. They can now grow up to be healthy and strong and educated. Everything has changed for them through the power of 3 rabbits.