“It is hot here! Very hot! There are blackouts and water shortages. It is not good, especially when temperatures exceed 40 degrees. I hope the rainy season will be as generous with water as the dry season has been with temperature,” wrote Gosia Tomaszewska, who is coordinating our projects in Burkina Faso and Togo.

The garden in Gourcy is growing pimentos – blazing hot chilli peppers – and carrots, for which a buyer has already been found. The families working in the Good Factory cooperative are preparing to plant tomatoes, leeks, celery, beetroot and parsley. In just a short while, the whole garden will be bursting with greens again.

“Everything is getting more expensive. A sack of maize already costs twice as much as it did at the beginning of the year. But you can’t complain, because it could always be worse. Ça va aller,” concludes Gosia.

Burkina Faso is on the brink of great troubles. Experts have long been ringing alarm bells that 2022 will bring a food crisis to the world. The reason? Supply chains disrupted during the pandemic and climate change, which is still progressing. Their catastrophic effects are now being experienced by those in our care. “It is impossible to function here, everything gets scorched by the heat. The garden cannot be neglected even for a moment or everything will wither,” says Elizabeth, who is involved in the project.

It is very easy to see how close Africa is to us and what a system of interconnected vessels the whole world is. The war being waged on our eastern neighbours, in which an important strategy of the Russians is to destroy and steal wheat stocks, could lead to famine for 1.7 billion people throughout the world. As a result of just one Russian attack in the Dnipropetrovsk region in late April, enough grain to feed 300 000 people for a year was burnt.

We have no control over how this world is made up, but we can still do a lot to help very specific families in the small village of Gourcy in the north of Burkina Faso. They are wonderful and very hardworking people, grateful for any help in getting them back to work. Just look at the work going on in our tailoring workshop, where dozens of women are being trained for the profession. Not all of them can work on the land. Those who cannot, still do what they can to find a way to support their families. Give them this opportunity by supporting our projects in Gourcy: the tailoring workshop and the agricultural cooperative.