Carlo Torriani

SWARGA DWAR

The conversion of a catholic missionary

presented by

Card. Simon Pimenta

PIME Publications, PIME Regional House, Eluru - 534 0-07, A.P., India

A BUNCH OF BANANAS

Letter No. 45, November 1994

Dear friends,

                    If you come to our ashram you will find yourself in an orchard of mangoes and bananas. But very few know that ten years ago there was not even one banana tree. Last week, for the first time, we hanged up a bunch of bananas in the dining hall so that anyone can take, as he likes.

                    For me that has been a sign of success: a partial self-sufficiency. One ideal of our ashram is to be completely self-sufficient.  When we decided to take this land we ask ourselves: how many people can leave out of the agricultural produce of 23 acres of land? I remember I read in a book that for a family of five you need five acres of land. Then we said: if we want to be self-sufficient, in our ashram we can take 25 inmates. We worked out our plan, we started cultivation and after three years we cultivated paddy in all the fields. For rice, we have enough for all the year and we can also give a meal, every day, to 150 children of the balvadis of Lok Seva Sangam.

But man does not live only on rice. We need vegetables and lentils. Here we are still far from self-sufficiency. In Bombay we have an extreme pattern of rainfall: four months of rain and eight months dry. For the dry season we drilled four bored wells and we are still working out a cultivation of vegetables.

What about the fruits? The main produce is mango, but they come all together in May. So we planted forty chikku, forty goava, but above all we planted hundreds shoots of bananas multiplying them year after year. We planted them in every place were irrigation water can reach. Fruits of banana are available throughout the year. We started counting the bunches of banana. 23 in 1987, 118 in ’90, 203 in ’93 and this year we have already got 300 bunches.

Now is somebody is tempted to snatch one banana from the tree when they are ripe, it doesn’t matter because there are always enough for all the community. That is why we decided to expose them in public in tne dining hall, so that everybody can take.

Isn’t it a good success for 25 leprosy patients who, before, were living begging in the streets?