The humanitarian aid project is preparing its first shipment of sunflower tea to send to Africa to help sick children recover from malaria.
Her interest in homeopathic remedies goes back many years. Growing up in Toronto, she spent a lot of time in Hyde Park, a 100-acre nature area.
“I had this big connection with nature from the get-go,” she said. “Homeopathy is … the energy of the petals. It's energetic medicine, for sure. And what it does is it stimulates the person's body to use their own self-healing mechanisms, basically.”
Three years ago, Kohn and a friend were offered an acre for gardening in Dunster, located in the Robson Valley region of British Columbia. Wanting to help the bees, the two decided to plant a field of sunflowers. The bees appreciated the flowers, and the two gardeners later learned of several dozen health benefits that can be derived from the leaves.
They eventually started a little company called the Who Knew Sunflower Tea Crew. This summer, they learned that sunflower tea could help people with malaria. The mosquito-borne parasitic disease causes more people to become sick and die than Kohn originally thought.
“One day I asked the question, ‘Do children still suffer from malaria?’ I found an alarming fact: every minute a child dies of malaria. The project now is to get the teas to these children who need it.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 627,000 people died of malaria in 2020 alone. The disease occurs mostly in impoverished tropical and subtropical areas of the world where it is a leading cause of illness and death. The most vulnerable groups are young children and pregnant women.
The Sunflower Project blossomed as a “see a need, fill a need” initiative. Kohn said she wants to make a positive contribution to the world, and offering the infirm a pot of healing tea fits that bill.
“What better way to help these children? Some of them are getting medications, but when one child per minute is dying, certainly there's help required. That's where we went to. Let's just donate all our time to this project, but let's fundraise the transportation costs associated with getting the actual product to the kids.”
They have a display set up at Jasper Rock and Jade where people can learn more about the project and make donations. They have already sent their first shipment of sunflower tea to Uganda.
Kohn intends to make sure that each delivery is successful with the hopes of growing the project to ship to more locations.
She said that all it takes is for people to give up buying a coffee for a day and put that money toward something helpful like this instead.
“There’s a real motivation to help,” she said. “I think as North Americans, we need some more empathy. We're still a rich country; we still have lots of things that we spend money on. There's a need out there. There are kids that are dying every minute.”
