NEWPORT/LITTLE COMPTON — Tradition has bestowed upon the humble tilapia the moniker of “St. Peter’s fish,” a nickname derived from the passage in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus instructs Simon Peter to pay the Temple tax with a coin miraculously recovered from a fish’s mouth. Although their tilapia may not have mouths full of money, the organizers of the Rwandan Aquaponics Network — a new nonprofit created through a collaboration between local parishes and Salve Regina University — hope that their fish might have something even more valuable to offer in the global battle against food insecurity.
It isn’t simply a seafood dinner, either: the aquaponics system at the heart of the project is a self-contained farm, capable of providing a family with a reliable source of fruit, vegetables, and, of course, fish. Distributed throughout communities in Southern Rwanda, these systems could expand food access in a region racked by widespread malnutrition after decades of warfare, genocide and social upheaval.
The closed-loop aquaponic system designed by the project essentially uses a large fish tank as a growing medium for basic vegetables, putting a school of tilapia to work as both fertilizer and food. Compared to traditional crops, this system helps to conserve water and is better suited for the heavily-degraded soil present in much of the nation.
The project had its start eight years ago and 7,000 miles away, when the Rwandan Catholic Diocese of Butare tasked Father Emmanuel Rutangusa with developing a community-oriented educational project for the newly established Catholic University of Rwanda.
“Our goal was to find a project that would help both our students and our community to develop,” explains Father Rutangusa. “We wanted our students to gain useful skills and knowledge in a way that would also directly serve the community.”
It was this goal which originally brought Father Rutangusa to New England to study, first at Boston College and now at Rivier University in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he is currently completing his Ph.D. in Education.
It wasn’t at either of those venerable institutions that Father Rutangusa met the community which would make the Rwandan Aquaponics Network a reality, however.
“When I arrived in America and was looking for a place to stay, I was contacted by the late Father Gerald Hussey at St. Madeleine Sophie, and he invited me to live there,” says Father Rutangusa. The Tiverton parish (together with its sister parish of St. Catherine of Siena in Little Compton) quickly became more than just a place of temporary residence and service for the priest.
“Over time, as I met and made friends with the parishioners here, I discovered how interested people were in assisting with my project, and we started working together as a team,” he says.
One of the first members of that new team was Henry Laferriere, a St. Catherine’s parishioner and former science teacher who currently serves as the project coordinator for the charity.
“As Father Emmanuel told us more about the problems faced by his home country, I saw an opportunity to put my background as an educator to use,” Laferriere says. “There were a few other retired teachers in the parishes who felt the same way, and we grew quickly. It seemed like people started coming out of the woodwork whenever we needed something — a videographer, someone to handle social media… Whatever we needed, we seemed to be blessed with.”
For Laferriere, participating in the Rwandan Aquaponics Network has a deep personal significance as well.
“My daughter, Danielle, was a junior at Salve when she was killed in a car accident in 2004,” he explains. “She was studying social work and was the kind of kid that just wanted to save the whole world — so this project really felt like a way to honor her ambitions.”
That Salve connection would come in handy as the project sought to expand.
“It quickly became clear that we needed to partner with an established non-profit in order to properly raise funds,” says Laferriere. Salve’s Department of Social Work, still brimming with the same spirit that characterized Danielle, was happy to offer its services.
“They’ve been so open-minded and open-hearted,” Laferriere says. “They’ve been involved with every stage of planning and have really helped to shore up the fiscal side of things.”
Perhaps the project’s most important contact at the university, however, has been Dr. Jameson Chace, the chair of the Department of Cultural, Environmental and Cultural Studies, as well as a professor of biology and biomedical science. In 2011, Dr. Chace created a hydroponics lab at Salve, which has proven to be an invaluable resource both to the Rwandan Aquaponics Network and to the local community.
“When we first started the lab, our students seemed primarily interested in the analytical and technical side of things — determining how best to grow vegetables in water rather than soil, and comparing the produce to traditionally grown counterparts,” he explains. “Over the past several years, however, the student focus really shifted to the value of the food itself and ways that it could be used to benefit the community.”
Prior to the pandemic, this had resulted in a coterie of scientific Seahawks setting up a table at the Newport Farmers’ Market with their water-grown produce. In the aftermath of Covid, however, the program began donating their leafy greens to the food pantry at the Martin Luther King Jr., Community Center instead.
“We make a drop off every other week, and we’re usually able to grow about 15 bags of lettuce or kale in that time, together with containers of chard, basil, cilantro, and other herbs and vegetables,” Chace says.
That remarkable production rate leaves Chace particularly excited about the potential of an aquaponic system to combat food insecurity in the developing world.
“We’ve been using a hydroponic system at Salve and having great results, but aquaponics can be even more efficient in the right setting,” he explains. “Aquaponics takes the same basic water-growing setup that we use, but adds fish to the equation. The nitrogen waste produced by the fish is an excellent fertilizer — nitrogen is exactly what the plants want. So that new dynamic can really fuel tremendous growth. Plus, the fish themselves provide tons of protein.”
The next stage of the project will be the construction of a model aquaponics farm at the Catholic University of Rwanda’s campus in Save, site of one of the first Catholic missions in Rwanda. That model will then be used as the basis for constructing similar systems throughout local communities, as well as a resource for instructing villagers on the delicate science of aquaponics.
“Hydroponics is much more straightforward — you have a lot more control over the water and the nutrients the plants receive,” Chace explains. “With aquaponics, the introduction of another organism makes everything a bit more complex. It can be much more efficient, but it can require a bit of specialized knowledge.”
Chace says that he hopes the next several years will see increasing collaboration between students at Salve and at CUR as they work together to build a “reservoir of knowledge” that can be shared with communities throughout Southern Rwanda.
“Pandemic permitting, we’d love to see students going on service trips to help install systems and work directly alongside their peers in Rwanda,” Chace says. “If that’s not possible, we hope to at least have them engaging with each other directly over Zoom in order to collaborate in aquaponics research.”
According to Ronald St. Martin, a parishioner at St. Catherine’s who has been involved with the project since its inception, the nonprofit has collected $11,000 out of an estimated $75,000 needed to build the initial farm at CUR’s Save campus.
“We’ve been fortunate to be able to work with Roger Shaw, a very successful Rwandan tilapia farmer, who helped us put together a comprehensive business plan for the project,” says St. Martin. “The parishes together have raised a little over $8,000, and we’re hoping that as we get broader exposure, we’ll find additional support outside the community. Ideally, we’d like to get the model farm under construction by the spring.”
One early supporter of the project was Deacon Dr. Timothy Flanagan, of St. Theresa and St. Christopher parishes in Tiverton. He is also an infectious disease specialist, and previously volunteered with Catholic health centers in Liberia during the Ebola crisis in 2013.
“Father Emmanuel has done great work organizing and advocating for this project,” says Deacon Flanagan. “It’s always critical to establish a personal connection when you’re advocating for a cause that’s so far away, and he really brings the issue to life.”
Although agriculture accounts for 70% of Rwanda’s economy, Father Rutangusa says that farmers in many regions struggle to meet the level of subsistence.
“In many areas, land is very scarce due to population growth,” he explains. “And the soil itself has been overused and can be very, very poor. Many people lack basic nutrients in their diet, especially protein. Fish is very luxurious, and common folks can rarely afford it. So an aquaponic system really can expand their diet.”
Father Rutangusa hopes that success with the model farm in Save will eventually allow the project to spread throughout Rwanda and, eventually, to neighboring countries.
“This is a national university, with students coming from all over to study here,” he says. “What they learn in public health and food science can lead to major changes on a national level. And through working with Salve Regina, we already have the beginning of an international connection.”
By way of conclusion, it is interesting to note that the Gospel of Matthew never mentions whether or not St. Peter actually caught that fish: somewhat unusually, it concludes simply with Christ’s instructions to the saintly fisherman and the promise that a miracle would take place. Whether the tilapia of the Rwandan Aquaponics Network will be able to effect a small miracle of their own remains to be seen, but the cause clearly has both faith and science on its side.
To support the project, or to learn more about the food crisis in Rwanda and view a video of Dr. Chace explaining aquaponics in greater detail, please visit www.helprwanda.org.
