A group of young people from the Czech town of Nové Město nad Metují have turned an unlikely product — bottled pigeon-manure fertiliser — into a small international charity, and this month their project was pushed into the public eye when the popular Czech singer-songwriter Pokáč wrote a song about it. Both the regional daily Náchodský deník and the Church of the Brethren (Církev bratrská) have since published articles about the initiative.
The project, run by children and teenagers linked to a Church of the Brethren congregation, sells a branded liquid fertiliser made from pigeon droppings in half-litre bottles for 30 Czech crowns. The proceeds go to A Rocha Uganda, which uses them to buy goats for very poor children, most of them orphans. A goat’s milk can pay a child’s school fees and provide a daily lunch, and when the animal has a kid, it is passed on to another child — a chain the young Czechs point out reaches much further than it first appears.
So far the project has sent more than 120,000 Czech crowns to Uganda and helped around 100 children, according to its own accounts. Some of the money also paid for surgery for a boy who broke his leg and was at risk of never walking again; he is walking now. The children’s involvement goes well beyond sales: pupils at Dobruška grammar school designed a range of labels — “for everyone,” the project notes, “from future digger drivers through sausages, a president and beavers to lovers of France, chocolate and cats.” The project has been featured on Czech Radio Hradec Králové, and Brána, the monthly magazine of the Church of the Brethren, interviewed the team in August, with an article due in October. The pigeons themselves appear at Church of the Brethren youth events: at a gathering where some 200 children re-enacted a battle with cardboard shields and paper balls, the birds were released as a symbol of reconciliation.
(Originally published in Czech. Summary translated by CC / Connexion.)
Source: Církev bratrská / Brána — https://portal.cb.cz/cs/clanky/13776-pokac-podporil-projekt-mladeze-z-cb-pisni-holubi-chcandy-do-ugandy
