Sausage Supper

About ten years ago I was employed on a food project based in an area that had one of the highest levels of social deprivation in Northern Ireland. The project “lets call it project X” was “Cross Border” and ”Peace Funded” which in local parlance is usually greeted with a snort of derision. The idea was to bring communities of different political/religious persuasions together to grow their own food and to do this in two separate geographical areas i.e. a community in the North of Ireland and a community in the Republic of Ireland. There was an immense amount of funding available for this and it was to last three years.

Children helping with the bean planting

One aspect of my job was to teach people how to grow their own food. Whilst project X was full of possibility the myriad of social issues providing the backdrop to what we were up to, relentlessly eroded any progress made by the team. As well as the usual difficulties such as poverty, social isolation, lack of education we also had terrorism, politics with a small “p”, suspicion and naked fear of the “other side ” antipathy between middle class and working/non working class. Staff were ill equipped to deal with what they were expected to deliver it was disheartening and the project closed in less than three and half years culminating with the offices being burnt down.

Whilst I paint a very bleak picture indeed there was a lot of learning especially by those paid to deliver and its this learning that is now being put to good use in Transition Omagh. One of the very first things we discovered whilst working on project X above, was that the family budget for whole swathes of some of those communities was firmly centred around the sausage supper!

The infamous sausage supper

Let me explain, you are a single mum you live in this housing estate with two maybe three children you are not yet twenty years of age. You left school when you got pregnant at 14, 15, 16, you are barely able to read and write, simple sums are out of the question. Getting pregnant gives you social status and more importantly a house to live in. Living now with young children, you do not know how to cook and have never learnt anything about good dietary habits or nutrition. Your income is your giro cheque, child benefit and housing benefit, you spend much of your time watching day time television. Your diet is the “Sausage Supper” why? because your local chippy runs a special called the “Sausage Supper” this costs 75p. At the beginning of the week you set aside £1.50 for each day, with this you can go to the takeaway, or more likely send one of the children and you get two big fat sausages with a handful of chips thrown in. Two sausage suppers are sufficient to feed you and two children amounting to £10.50 for the week. You hear about a project down the road that wants you to “grow your own vegetables” because a flyer has come in through the door. You ask yourself “why would anyone want to do such a stupid thing, sure can’t you get them in the shop and even if you did grow something what would you do with them? ” You know that you are a useless cook and you think to yourself about how you hate all vegetables and can’t ever remember eating them in your life, and even worse, you would have to leave the house and you don't do that much any more since you have put on so much weight. Impatiently you throw the flyer into the bin and wonder when will that bunch of "do gooders" down the road start to do something that is relevant to your life, as you send the five year old to pick up the sausage supper!

Ladies taking a well earned break

For years the sausage supper represents all that is wrong with our food systems, and we have been determined in Transition to play an active toll in its demise. Using Transition as a vehicle we set up the “Greenshoots NI Gardening Project”, we wanted to make growing your own food “sexy”.....for everyone not just for the followers of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall et al.  but for those stuck without choice on the sausage supper diet. We wondered for a long time how we could do this. It started with running hands on organic gardening classes for adults...effective, yet attracting those who were already converted and after a year or two interest began to peter out as the economic downturn started to take effect.Interesting to note that we did not have one sausage supper participant even though there was ample ways that folk with little or no finances could join the gardening classes.

From this point we then moved into providing allotment training for groups to enable communities to set up their own allotments, again quite good but still a huge up hill battle to keep people engaged and involved, and again appealed only to those who really wanted to garden

 Finally we tried the schools. About two and half years ago we approached three primary schools and said to them that we would like to run a pilot vegetable growing activity with their p6 or p7. It went down a treat, everyone loved it the children, the teachers and not least the folk delivering it. Happiness all round, we financed it by going after small amounts of grants or working with schools that had extended schools funding. In some cases there was no funding at all, the schools just wanted vegetable gardening and found the money for it. It literally only took one phone call. Food growing was suddenly “sexy” and the schools wanted it.

Making paper planting pots

During the course of the eight weeks of gardening activities we cover many different topics. Why its important to grow your own food, what a good healthy diet is and why that is important, how to sow, grow, harvest, store and cook the food you eat. We have dirty hands competitions, we have bug identification sessions, we have extended and funny watering sessions( when the teachers backs are turned) . We encourage the children to handle and become comfortable with all creatures in the garden. They experience every gardening activity imaginable and quickly move from being very uncomfortable and awkward in the outdoor environment to easy familiarity, they have fun and look forward to getting out of class every week. Children who do not normally shine begin to come to the fore and their teachers tell us that they see them changing from week to week. Many of the children can name the vegetable plants just by looking at them, know what to do with them, and what they taste like. At least one in every class has said they want to be a gardener when they grow up! Their enthusiasm is infectious and they are bringing this keenness home with them and of course this starts the conversation.....starts something that just wasn’t going to happen anyways.

Currently there are about 500 children on the programme so the concept of growing your own food is been talked about in over 400 homes in towns and villages all over Tyrone and Fermanagh. The children are beginning to break down barriers, called it pester power, call it whatever, growing your own food is no longer a foreign country, it is becoming a real possibility in the lives of those who would never before considered such a thing, This year we are in fourteen schools, there are now four of us delivering the programme. Hundreds of children are being exposed to growing their own and no matter what happens to them later in life at least they may be able to avoid a sausage supper future, because of seeds sown in their formative years.

The first day in a new school garden

The short term plan is to roll the scheme out across Northern Ireland in the coming year, build in long sustainability through teacher training and raising awareness.As for Transition Omagh, we are extremely proud of what we are achieving with the minimum of bureaucracy and funding and the maximum of enthusiasm, good nature and a can do attitude. For the writer, this has been the most satisfying Transition project of all so far and that somehow makes all the down days worthwhile.



Image 1 Children and families working on a bean frame

Image 2 The famous sausage supper thanks to Roddy Mcleod for the image ttp://roddymacleod.wordpress.com

Image 3 Community gardeners taking a well earned break

Image 4 Selection of vegetables grown by the children

Image 5 A hot day in the school polytunnle

Image 6 The start of a new school garden

An Outstanding Intergenerational Project

This is a story about Sean (not his real name) his identity has to be kept secret, for reasons that will become clear as I tell this tale. Sean would have had an interesting past life, not all of it on the right side of the law, consequently spent some of his time here on earth enjoying the benefits of her majesty’s hospitality. Sean’s heart is mostly in the right place and he is very active in Transition Omagh. He approached the core group last year with an idea for a project for increasing the resilience of pensioners. He told us that he was nearly 68 years of age, was living on a meagre pension which was steadily being eroded by our nose diving economy, was renting his house and could see that he was clearly heading into an old age of poverty and loneliness. He submitted to us the following idea…..

Creatively Use and Respond to Change

It was just coming to twilight, it had been a gorgeous February day, a rare enough occurrence here in Ireland .The last low weak light of a cold spring evening just beginning to disappear. We were driving on our way home from Cloughjordan eco village
in Tipperary, where we had been attending the first CSA conference in Ireland.

Cloughjordan eco village

I wasn’t driving so had time to observe the passing countryside, when to my right out of the corner of my eye I noticed what I thought was a pall of light grey smoke hanging over the top of a low hill to the North east of our road about a mile away. I studied it for a while and realised at once my mistake it was in fact a flock of starlings, it was actually a mega flock certainly the biggest flock I have ever seen. The road was a busy main artery leading north, and us motorists had just started to switch on vehicle lights in the dusk of the early evening. Ahead of us a number of cars had pulled in on both sides of the road, people stopping to watch the spectacle.
Hastily we pulled over and jumped out in to the cool evening. For miles up and down that straight road we could see cars with their head lights coming and going in both directions, oblivious to the spectacular extravaganza that nature had provided.

Transition Omagh Energy Project

After many months spent wringing hands and declaring much like Captain Peacock in Juno and the Peacock that  "Th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis" - (Captain Boyle, Act III). Transition Omagh slowly moves into action. Early into 2011, the energy group awakens, scratches yawns, stands up, sniffs the air and trots off purposefully. It is not long before one of the group comes back with a proposal, a filled in application that needed signing and the possibility for us to seriously reduce our carbon footprint.It was exciting and great at the same time, because at last we had something that was measurable, practical, attractive to peoples wallets and the promise of engaging many.

Stream of Consciousness

Like the invincible teenager Cu Chullin I want to pound up and down the land raising awareness grapple with the armies of indifference, shout at the night sky and rage at the moon, grab Transition by the neck and hurl it in to every city, town, village and community of Ireland. My impatience, anger and impotence seethes like pus and makes me restless. I strong-arm my energy in fruitless attempt as to cover a suppurating sore with sticking plaster, to dam the strength and passion that oozes, pulsates and bursts from my skin, for fear of irreparable damage in careless word or action.

We are David versus Goliath in an extraordinary sea of apathy. From the bunkers of Transition let us use our simple slings, and for those weapons to be possessed by demon words, rousing everyone from temporary indifference, exploding bedrock beliefs, opening minds and igniting souls with audacity and skill to radically change and transform the very essence of humanity. I refuse to believe that we are like the Marie Celeste blithely sailing rudderless, on an on into an unknowable, unworkable, questionable future. Daily I imagine Transition powerfully steering, holding and shaping the course of this social epidemic, implacable in the face of indifference, persevering against all odds, reaffirming our potential for change and safe in the knowledge of our power of positive action.

Thats a window into my subconscious, the right brain part of me, that bit that defies logic, the bit that stands up and says“no you are not beat” (pronounced bate in Northern Ireland speak) That bit of me that doesn’t know when its bate! That part of me that has an unshakeable belief, that there are many solutions, that collectively we have the intellect, the power and the wherewithal to influence, engage, activate and inspire those around us. That we all are transformative leaders, from the smallest to the greatest of us creating something new that answers our concerns, something that wasn’t necessarily going to happen anyways.  

So where now for Transition Omagh?

Applying that stream of consciousness thinking (and considering our recent setback in Omagh around the community cafe that didn’t happen read here). We are back at the drawing board re-inventing, re-igniting, re-inspiring, implacably moving on in the face of adversity. Inhaling deeply, focussing inwardly and drawing on the right side of the brain, we return to basics; as someone said earlier on this week “ we start from where we are, with what we have, to do the best we can.” Below is a (now) snapshot of Transition Omagh and what we have to work with.

Fracking Film Gaslands

 Transition Omagh is hosting a free screening of Gaslands Film about Fracking  

Brogans pub  Omagh 8pm Wed Feb 1st  

For more information about the film click here

Come at 7pm to hear about what else is going on in Transition Omagh   

• The  benefits that some folk have experienced from the Transition energy project from a participants point of view. 
• The experiences of a teachers involvement with the  Transition schools growing  project from a participating  teacher

And about whats coming up in the near future 

•  Information about an exciting  apple grafting day in March .
• What would you like to do that Transition could support you with?  

Thanks to Fracking Free Ireland for the posters

An avalanche of comments

For the past three months I have been writing on the Social Reporting blog here. The first part of this pilot has come to and end and now we are about to start again. For the month of January we are looking back at pieces that stood out for us which were written by others. All I have to do is to select three pieces that have appealed to me from this social reporting adventure, then  make one more choice about what to republish. So here goes. For something that's real on the ground  with a can do attitude and very relevant to the Northern part of the UK and Ireland enjoy Catriona Ross's piece The Joy of 
Eigg.

For my second recommendation. I knew which one it was, but it was quite a job to remember who wrote it, when it was published and where it could be found on the social reporting blog! But I remembered it clearly and the subsequent avalanche of comments that followed it. It resonated so much with me being from Northern Ireland, and if I am honest I truly felt unable and unwilling to get involved in the subsequent semi political discussion. I was interested that it brought up such a reaction in me ….the peace builder and transition person!!! It is of course Ann Owen's "Cenedl heb iaith yw cenedl heb galon"
Finally my last selection was fraught with difficulty. Endeavouring to choose just one of the pieces written by our online community to republish, is truly a difficult thing to do. I started with the idea that I would pick a piece that spoke to me and moved me and yet was fundamental to Transition thinking. Of course Charlotte and probably everyone else had the same idea, and yesterday she duly reposted Tamzin Pinkerton stellar piece of work about food and health. I am not surprised, however now I am forced to move to plan B….which of course I don't have.
Anxiously I start to skim over some of the ninety two posts and quickly realise I don't have a mission. I should have started long before this, become a lot more familiar with the content, inwardly curse myself then stop take a deep breath and start to think like a permaculturalist…What would a permaculturalist do ? ‘Creatively use and respond to change’ jumps back at me as an answer, so I  start to write, thinking I will wait and see what comes out of the ends of my finger tips. As I write, subconsciously my somewhat jumpy agitated mind is backcasting and keeps coming to the same post again and again. That is Charlotte Du Cann’s piece the fire stealers- a love story

Pondering why I should choose this piece I realise that it had stirred up many questions from deep within me about Transition and my reasons for being involved.  Charlotte's writing for me clearly captures, holds and reflects all that we as a community set out to accomplish during the life of this collaborative writing venture. On reading it a quiet yet clear understanding stole over me around my role in Transition: To write about Transition! It stimulated nourished and strengthened the desire in me to continue to hold that fire in the face of adversity. This one sentence "The fact is some of us can see in the dark, and we know what's coming if we don't pass on the fire" provided the electric jolt to remind me about the importance of our conversation, for without that conversation there is nothing. Enjoy!

Thanks to Catriona, Ann and Charlotte for photographs from their pieces.