Greenhouse collapsed
Severe snowstorms with up to 4 meters of snow and extremely heavy winds, one of our newly constructed greenhouses at our AMURTEL Poieni farm completely collapsed as did hundreds from across the county. The Romanian government declared a state of emergency and the army was called in to rescue people stranded in
their houses. We need your help to reconstruct the greenhouses so the project can continue.
Our second successful season
This disaster came after our Community Supported Agriculture farm project had just concluded a very successful year – production increased from 1 ton of vegetables in the first year to about 5 tons this season. The farm produced weekly baskets of fresh organic vegetables for 35 enrolled consumers in Bucharest, as well as providing for the Familia AMURTEL children’s home and the Bucharest kindergarten. It also offered work experience for our young people preparing to leave the protected care of our Familia AMURTEL home and created jobs for two hardworking women in the village, Cristina and Daniela.
New Infrastructure
We had received a grant from the Trentino region to install a modern drip irrigation system, and one from Solidea to build a medium size greenhouse. In addition, the project’s business plan was awarded a prize for excellence as a Social Enterprise by the Prometheus project. It was the prize money that was used to construct the new greenhouse of 500 sq. meters that has now collapsed. Another greenhouse, now partially collapsed was constructed with donations. This summer, the farm was featured on the front page of the Romania Libera newspaper, and presented as a work-integration model in international conferences in France, Spain and Portugal. We were looking forward to being able to start the season early and to have even better production for our own projects and the consumers this year as our team has gained a lot more experience – and had finally gotten the necessary infrastructure in place.
Emergency aid needed to reconstruct quickly
It is a crushing blow but we are counting on Grace to recover and “build back better.” We ned your aid to keep the project moving forward. This year we planned to extend to include two other small farmers. Your donation is important and will help us overcome this obstacle and increase our self-sufficiency in providing food for our children and work experience for the young adults. We need to start planting in a just a few weeks to be able to harvest on time. Please help!