At a recent IQFA committee meeting, a grant was awarded to a small charity situated in the town of Sened in rural Tunisia. (see Red marker on the map below)
This charity was started by Fr Dominique Tommy-Martin, who has a long history with IQFA. An IQFA committee member who worked as a peace corps volunteer in Tunisia made contact with Fr Dominique in the 1980s and this contact has remained over the years. The purpose of the charity is to help young people with handicaps to learn agricultural skills so that they can find work and dignity.
In 2020 IQFA gave a grant to help with the building of a well as part of this project.
Water tank with the 2020 well pump in the background
In June 2022 IQFA continued its support for the project. The focus of the current stage of the project is to purchase 4 dairy cows and to provide these young people with agricultural skills so that they reintegrate into society and live with dignity.
Dignity is very important to this project as the Sened Association Farm Cattle Breeding Project say “The purpose of this project is to promote the care/empowerment and value of handicapped persons and their integration into the social life of society. To develop the structures of vocational training, especially in agriculture area, which had given a lot of satisfaction on the educational level, and even on the professional level, in order to ensure these students a future by providing them with the possibility of exercising and acquiring a trade at the end of the training, and that will facilitate their integration in the society”.
