Veggie therapy

On Dec 5 last year, Wen Peng tucked into a plate of sauteed Chinese cabbage.

It was a simple meal, but he can still remember relishing it vividly.

"The sweet taste of the vegetables helped salve the tough times there," Wen says.

The 30-year-old was part of 140 Chinese UN peacekeeping police officers deployed to Liberia on an eight-month mission starting last October.

There were minimal resources and the lack of a vegetable supply added to the hardships they had to endure.

Wen and 33 of his colleagues were soon tasked with setting up and maintaining a vegetable patch at their campsite, which was built on wasteland.

Many say they were given an impossible task.

"We had to do everything from scratch," Wen says. Liberia is covered with tropical rain forests that are hard to clear for growing crops, he says.

They spent half a month clearing weeds and tilling the soil. They experimented with about 5 kg of seed for one month.

Finally, they managed to reap their first harvest of Chinese cabbage.

"We harvested about 12 kg first. After that, Chinese cabbage could be picked every two or three days," Wen says.

They also planted sponge gourds, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and even fruit like watermelon and muskmelon.

The 1,000-square-meter patch yielded about 1,500 kg of vegetables during their stay, Wen says. He kept a notebook to track every harvest.

"Our vegetables were totally organic. We fertilized it with our own waste," Wen says. The smell and work were expectedly unpleasant, but the results more than made up for it, he says.

He has been home for more than a month, but Wen says he still misses the vegetable patch.

"It was like our very own backyard in Liberia," he says.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 08/01/2014 page16)