A few weeks after I met the barefoot messenger in Bird Village, one of my associates and I flew to Hyderabad in south India to meet with a group of scientists at the Nutrition Foundation of India. As we entered the building, I saw a large cloth banner reading:
“Moringa leaves contain ten times more beta carotene than carrots.”
This information hit me as if someone had slammed a two-by-four squarely between my eyes. I was stunned. I knew that beta carotene was the precursor of vitamin A, and that diets deficient in vitamin A were the cause of millions of children around the world going blind each year. I did not know that moringa leaves contained such great amounts of beta carotene. They could save millions of innocent young children from the clutches of blindness.
My friend who had traveled with me could not understand why I was standing there with dazed eyes in front of this banner. He pulled me by my arm and reminded me that people were waiting for us inside. We had rushed through the maddening traffic of Hyderabad to get there, and now I was wasting valuable time right in front of our destination.
I stood there in disbelief. The barefoot messenger who had traveled to Bird Village was right. It can’t be, I thought. Not only was he right about moringa, he was also right about the information reaching the scientists. How could he have known?
As a result, the meeting with the scientists took a different turn than originally planned. I was no longer interested in other fruit trees. I pelted them with questions about the moringa tree. Were the moringa leaves digestible after cooking? Was the beta carotene digestible? Was vitamin A lost in cooking? What were the side effects? On and on my questions went.
My partner was disgusted with me for having changed the agenda of the meeting without notice. It was as if we had been floating together on a river and, all of a sudden, an undercurrent had caught hold of me.
After that, information about moringa started to pour in from all sources. There was ample information about the vitamin A in moringa, but it was locked in the Ivory Towers. It had not trickled down to the grassroots.
Trees for Life decided to do a social marketing test to see how this message could be delivered to the masses, where it was needed. As we were strategizing, a grant from Opportunities for Micro-Nutrient Interventions (OMNI) Research fell into our lap. Amazingly, the grant opportunity was specifically for testing social communications for micronutrients, which was OMNI’s focus. The timing of the coincidence was uncanny.
With the support of the grant, five of us from Wichita went to Orissa in 1995-1996 to conduct a five-month test campaign in 20 isolated villages, with Bird Village and the Learning Center as our base.
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