Foreign Affairs Committee on March 26th, 2015

[Gary Schellenberger, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I pickle eggs too.

[Tim Lambert]

Yes, you can pickle them. They also can be pasteurized in shell. That's not a technique that we've looked at just yet.

With the volume of eggs they'll be going through with their hot meal program, I suspect that as they're hard-cooked, moved out, and consumed, we'll be looking at a matter of storage for maybe a week or so, rather than months. We will have the kind of facility that's part of our farm and has some cold storage capacity, so we should be okay there.

[Janine Maxwell]

Also, we don't refrigerate our eggs in Africa, and they last for four to six weeks. We keep them on our counter. No one refrigerates eggs there.

[Ian Maxwell]

They don't wash them.

[Janine Maxwell]

They're not washed.

[Ian Maxwell]

You get feathers and all sorts of things on them.

[Janine Maxwell]

They're not clean, but they don't go bad.

[Tim Lambert]

In Europe, they're not allowed to refrigerate eggs. If you go to a grocery store anywhere in Europe, you'll see them over where the bread is. They won't be in the cooler with the milk.

[Gary Schellenberger, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I can remember going to my grandma's and grandpa's farm and gathering the eggs and taking them up to the house. Grandma would be sitting there with a cloth washing all the eggs to make sure they were good and clean when they went to the store.

I know that we've talked about this terrible situation where you find so many orphans in a country. I commend you so much for doing the small part that you can, because if everyone does a small part, it all makes a difference.

I sponsor a child in Malawi. I've had some of the same thoughts you've had about how I can help some of the people around that child I sponsor. Again, I don't know whether it's in a village situation or not, but you've given me some ideas today, and once I retire from this job, which will be at the next election, they might give me some inspiration to do some good going forward. That's just a statement.

Thank you very much for your testimony this morning, and thank you very much to the Egg Farmers of Canada in supporting this great cause.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Madam Laverdière, you have five minutes.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Can you tell me whether there is a serious tuberculosis problem in Swaziland? As we know, AIDS is often accompanied by tuberculosis. It is one of its serious complications.

[Janine Maxwell]

They often say that TB and AIDS are best friends. In Swaziland, we have a national TB hospital. In the last two years, I have spent a lot of time there, because I have four babies whose mothers have passed away in the national TB hospital. In fact, if you go to the Egg Farmers of Canada website, you will see that on the very front page there's a picture of two beautiful little girls named Rachel and Leah, and they're eating hard-boiled eggs. Their mother was one who succumbed to multiple-drug-resistant TB.

I met with the doctors there and I went to visit that mother every week for almost a year, hoping that we could get her to live. I would bring her photos of her children. I would bring her short videos. I would bring her food, the protein she needed, hoping that if we could get her to live, I would have two orphans less. In the end, we moved her to our farm so that she could die with dignity.

No one knows what the numbers are, but when I sit with the doctors at that national TB hospital, they estimate that 70% of the country has active or inactive TB. They guess that 30% of that is drug resistant, which is a nightmare, because people transport all over the country in very crowded van, or what we call Kombis. These people are immune-suppressed, and it's a disaster.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

You've also mentioned a couple of times the fact that women abandon their babies by the river, and you talked about hopelessness on the part of people. I presume the two are tied, but I would like to better understand what drives these women to simply abandon their kids.

[Janine Maxwell]

I wish I knew. I've only met one mother like that, because usually when the children are abandoned, they are abandoned. We don't find the mothers. I met one mother who tried to do something. In fact, Tim was with me at the time. This young mother was 22 years old and gave birth at 11 o'clock at night. When she found out she was pregnant, she went to the man who impregnated her and he denied even knowing her. Then she was embarrassed in front of her family. She was ashamed. There's a lot of shame. The family was calling her names.

At 11 o'clock at night she gave birth and dumped the baby in a pit latrine in an outhouse. At 5 a.m. the next morning she went back to check on the baby, and the baby was alive, so she got fire and went and dumped fire in on top of the child. Her uncle heard the baby crying, and he ran and got dirt and piled dirt on top of the child to put the fire out. Then someone crawled down two or three metres and pulled the child out. The child was severely burned on her face, her hand, and her leg, and she lost her big toe. She went to the government hospital. She was there for six weeks. She lived. I don't know how, with the wounds she had.

The mother, of course, had to be there to care for her. The mother who attempted to murder the child is the caregiver in the hospital, because that's what they do. When the child was discharged, the mother was sent to the local women's prison. That day was the day that the CEO of the Egg Farmers of Canada and the chairman arrived. I said to them that I was going to pick up a baby and asked them if they would like to come. They got in the car with me. They probably would say no the next time; I'm not sure they will ever travel with me again. We actually got two babies that day and two the next day.

When we got there, I walked into the women's prison and I saw the child. The mother was there. I didn't know it was a burned baby. I immediately unwrapped her on the commandant's desk, evaluated the situation, and asked the mother to tell me her story, which she did. At the end of it I said to her—I'm sorry that I'm going on so long—that I never get to ask the mother who does this, and I asked her, “Why did you do it?” It was awkward for me to ask the question. It was an embarrassing moment, because I felt her shame. She just wept. She just wept. She didn't have an answer. She felt that she had no other solution.

So I can't answer that question.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much.

I have two quick questions. You may not have time to fully answer the second one.

I would like to know what name you chose for the future leader of the country. Secondly, I would like to know this:

What's the snake story?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Janine Maxwell]

I don't have a name.

I can tell you that the river baby was named River, and I can tell you that the burned baby is named Shirley.

Tim, the snakes...?

[Tim Lambert]

After our day at the women's prison, we also had to go to the psychiatric hospital to pick up a baby, so that's a whole other story.

We were trying to relax in the evening, sitting out by a fire. They have quite a few dogs on the property. All of a sudden the dogs go into some sort of pack mode, and Janine says, “Don't anybody move.” Ian gets up and gets a flashlight and shovel.

Literally right behind my chair was a puff adder. Puff adders kill more people in Africa than any other type of snake. I hate snakes. I really don't like snakes; I have a thing about snakes.

Ian's trying to hold the flashlight and kill the snake. I take the flashlight. The snake is wedged in a little stone wall. The shovel's not sharp enough, and the snake's trying to get out, and I'm trying not to wet my pants, and Ian's trying to dispatch the snake.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Tim Lambert]

I actually have a picture of the snake, which we finally got. I can show you later. Yes, that's the snake story.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We're making it so welcoming for you, Tim, that you will always want to go back over and over again.

Ms. Brown, please, for five minutes.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

This has been most informative.

Janine, it's not easy, but thanks for sharing your heart. It's difficult. I've been in 22 African countries now, and the need is desperate, there's no doubt about it.

Tim, to go back to the subject of eggs, if I may, we buy powdered eggs. I don't buy them often, but we can buy powdered eggs. We take them camping with us. Is there any mechanism for doing that same kind of processing in Africa? You can hard-boil eggs, you say, but they are fragile to transport. That's a cost. Is there any mechanism for a process that could be utilized to enhance what you're trying to do? Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Tim Lambert]

We donate I think 16 tonnes a year to a children's charity in the form of powdered egg. That's another thing we're involved in.

I suppose part of it is that we've focused on teaching them basic agricultural production skills. When you get into further processing, you're into some of the challenges. A relay switch on the equipment stops working, or a fuse blows, and nobody knows how to look after the equipment. I think our focus has been the things I mentioned previously.

But the short answer to your question is that there's no reason that it couldn't be contemplated at some point or in some way. It's just that you get into more technology use and the challenges that go with that. That's not a reason not to do it.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

In cooperation with the larger-scale companies that you say are moving in, perhaps that's something that could be contemplated. I know that they're raising the pullets to send elsewhere and that's really their focus, but if there's an opportunity there, perhaps that could also be contemplated as part of sustainability. Then you would know that you are getting ready nutrition into the hands of the people who are most vulnerable. I'm just thinking down the road, I suppose.

If you were to start on a small scale—because obviously there will be people interested in small-scale farming—what would it look like? You said that you have a mechanism that will help to get the process started. I think that's a little more advanced than the small-scale farmer. How many pullets would you recommend to start off a small-scale farmer? Also, what would be the cost of this technology that you're saying is a kind of one-stop shop for farmers?

[Tim Lambert]

I suppose it could be as small as a handful of birds. The units we're building in Swaziland are two 2,500-bird houses. The project I referred to in Mozambique houses roughly 2,000 birds per unit, from which you're going to get—I don't know—a little less than an egg a day. They're pretty prolific producers of eggs, so probably at 2,000 birds you're going to have some 1,500 eggs. That feeds a lot of people. While 2,000 birds might sound like a lot, the average commercial flock in the U.S. is 1.5 million birds.