Pastor Mahamba Waibera Evariste, Country Manager of Warm Heart DR Congo
One of the best things about biochar is that it inspires great people to action.
This, of course, is what happened in Malawi to begin the rapid growth of biochar in East Africa under the guiding hand of Sister Paulet.
Now it has happened again in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where Pastor Mahamba Waibera Evariste has stepped forward to champion biochar for poor farmers.
Pastor Waibera works on the still turbulent eastern border of the Congo, in an area the contains Virunga National Park, home of the great gorillas and Mount Nyangongo, the active volcano that exploded recently sending floods of lava all the way to the edge of Goma City on the southern border of North Kivu Province.
Pastor Waibera travels up and down the East, ministering and teaching at 46 churches from Beni in the North south past Goma.
In addition to church members, Pastor Waibera teaches improved agricultural practices to villages everywhere he goes, speaks about better agriculture on five different radio stations, one located at a national agricultural university and records podcasts that are played when he is unavailable to broadcast himself.
He reaches thousands of listeners with his radio shows and brings the importance of climate change, PM2.5 reduction and biochar in the soil or animal feed to some of the most isolated people in the world.
It is through the tireless work of biochar volunteers such as Pastor Waibera and the local extension agents he has trained that the biochar story has spread so widely in Africa.
Today, literally thousands of the poorest, most isolated and forgotten farmers in the world are improving their own lives by using biochar made from the crop waste they once burned.
