Killing two birds with one stone

Pumpkins in Austria help orphans in Africa

Actually, they didn't intend to kill two birds with one stone. They didn't want to harm any insects at all. Quite the opposite. Their goal was to create a wildflower meadow in Burgkirchen, Austria (near Braunau am Inn) to provide much-needed and increasingly difficult foraging for bees and other insects throughout the summer (no bees - no pollination - no fruit).

However, since the soil for the desired variety of flowers was too rich, i.e., too well fertilized, nutrients first had to be removed. And so, computer teacher Helge Stangl and his wife Christa, an accountant at Seminar Schloss Bogenhofen, came up with the idea of initially planting pumpkins in 2017 on a rented field of a good 5,000 square meters – directly behind their house – before the splendor of flowers could emerge in 2018.

Through their long-standing acquaintance and collaboration with Thomas Küsel, who served as managing director in Bogenhofen for about 10 years before moving to East Africa with his wife Beate, they had the idea of donating the proceeds from the pumpkin harvest to the Dunia ya Heri orphanage project in Tanzania.

And so, at the end of May, after preparing the field and with the help of 17 young people from the local junior fire brigade, 500 plants of the Butternut, Hokkaido, and Muskat varieties were planted. The harvest is scheduled for September and October. Visitors and hikers – the field is directly adjacent to a popular hiking trail – cannot buy the pumpkins, but can only take them in exchange for a donation of any amount. These donations are simply placed into a cash box next to the piled-up pumpkins, where the use of the donations and the orphanage project itself are also explained (as a reference value: organic pumpkins in Austria cost about 1.70 Euros per kilo this year).

Judith Klier, chairwoman of the Dunia-ya-Heri parent association in Germany, and Brigitte Kinder, chairwoman of Dunia ya Heri Austria, and of course Thomas and Beate, are thrilled with the Stangls' idea. They hope that there will be other supporters of the orphanage who develop similarly creative projects to help the orphaned children in Africa.

Gerhard Padderatz

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