Peanut Butter Part Two

Back in October I wrote a post about a peanut butter project Faith Alive had been working on; to date we have all the equipment needed to start basic production-oven (buying this week sometime), grinder, mixer, scale, etc. All of last week Stephen and I worked along side Julie and Krysty, two women running the project, to sort out logistics and other loose ends that have been keeping things from proceeding thus far.

This week will be more of the same, organizing, coordinating, sorting out details of the study, etc.. We’re hoping by the end of next week we’ll be ready to start production of the fortified peanut butter paste. Once productions starts, we’ll need to get a temporary certification from the Nigerian equivalent of the FDA. Once we have that we can take our study proposal to five local hospitals to do a trial with fifty clinically malnourished children. We hope to generate results close to Dr. Manary’s studies; that is an 80% success rate with children fully recovering after a period of six weeks. Our study will run for a total of two months, at the end of which we hope to produce the peanut butter product en mass.

On a separate but related note, if you’re interested more stories/experiences from Faith Alive, check out Stephen’s blog at: http://stephen_gire.typepad.com/nigeria/ Lot’s of great pics and stories to add to anything I’ve been able to convey.