Lesson 3 The Power of Helping Others
A Korean Chief in Nigeria
____ is a Korean man who became the chief of a Nigerian tribe for making huge contributions to Nigeria’s agriculture and economy. Here is his story.
Dr. Hahn is ____ agriculturist who specialized in plant breeding.
Growing up right after the Korean war, he knew what it was like to be hungry, and he wanted to ____ people in need.
In ____ he was given two opportunities: work for Cambridge University or for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria.
On his ____ to Cambridge for a job interview, he first stopped in Nigeria.
There, he saw the country had been destroyed by ____ civil war.
More than 2 million people ____ died, and more than half a million people were starving.
Dr. Hahn wanted to rescue Nigerians ____ hunger.
So, he ____ his family and moved to Nigeria.
When Dr. Hahn got there, he learned that the staple food in ____ was a plant called cassava.
Unfortunately, cassava was defenseless against viral and bacterial ____ so it did not yield much crop.
Knowing this, he decided to develop stronger ____ varieties with higher yields.
However, Dr. Hahn faced a problem: there was not ____ information available about cassava.
Cassava was rarely studied or developed because ____ was not a cash crop.
To ____ matters worse, he had never seen or eaten cassava before.
While studying African cassava, Dr. Hahn found out that the Europeans who colonized Brazil had first brought ____ into Africa.
He immediately flew to ____ to study the original cassava.
There, he learned about it and went back ____ Nigeria with Brazilian cassava seeds.
Then, Dr. Hahn traveled to every corner of Nigeria and collected different ____ of local cassava to see if they were good at fighting diseases, but they weren’t.
____ he found a plant that was similar to cassava but resistant to diseases.
He ____ crossing this plant with the Brazilian cassava.
After five years of ____ work, Dr. Hahn finally succeeded in developing new varieties of cassava.
They yielded much more than the local ones ____ could survive diseases.
Another obstacle
Another obstacle Dr. Hahn faced was distributing the new ____
Local farmers would not ____ to a foreigner.
To overcome this problem, Dr. Hahn visited markets, churches, and schools and gave out the ____ varieties to Nigerian people for free.
He went from one house to the next to let farmers know the superiority of these ____ varieties.
Sometimes he ____ them in the middle of the cassava field without telling the farmers.
His colleagues were concerned that the farmers ____ be angry to find different cassava in their fields.
However, Dr. Hahn insisted that the farmers would think that it was ____ gift from God.
He was right. The farmers soon realized the superiority of the new ____ and more and more farmers started to cultivate them.
Thanks to the ____ cassava, fewer people were starving.
In fact, they ____ even make more money by selling the remaining cassava.
Eventually, Nigeria became the country that produced the greatest amount ____ cassava in the world.
In 1983, the Yoruba, a major tribe of Nigeria, honored Dr. Hahn as a ____ with the title “Seriki Agbe” or “the King of Farmers.”
In addition to cassava, Dr. Hahn developed other ____ foods, including yam, sweet potato, and banana.
Soon, other African ____ asked for his help.
Dr. Hahn traveled to these countries to teach local farmers and scholars how to grow these ____ varieties.
He spent 23 years developing and distributing the new cassava varieties to ____ whole continent.
Although he left Nigeria in 1994, he is still remembered as one of the greatest scientists who fought against starvation ____ Africa.
Dr. Hahn once said, “If you ____ faith that what you do will benefit humanity, I believe that you must sacrifice yourself.
Even ____ I were to go back to the past, I would still do the same thing.”