SPATH

Winifred Sighan and her husband Paul only saw the dawn of an economic prosperity through a Heifer international Cameroon training and support of a sheep project with their Tirnyuy women’s Common Initiative Group at the Kekaikom community in Bui division of the North West region of Cameroon in 2005.

Winifred and Paul have 8 children (4boys and 4 girls). Winifred had a challenging task to feed her family and support her husband’s limping business. “I was living in this compound in misery” she said of the past. Winifred’s over dependency on her husband for income and any emergency spending pushed her to a begging end and consequent misery. The kind of misery which necessitated her and some 13 women in her community to form the Tirnyuy women’s common initiative group in the year 2000. Their task was to complement one another in labor, with food crops and cash. “We wanted to help ourselves”. She said. Yet her dreams were never realized despite working in collaboration with her children their food crop harvest was never enough. Poor feeding brought in health complications like stomach problems for some of her children and gastric pains for Winifred. “Part of the children’s school fee was spent in the hospital” she recalled.