Recipe for hope: B.C. woman's banana bread helps build orphanage, school, clinic

Her name is Barb Giraud, but to many people she’s “The Banana Bread Lady.”

Thirteen years ago, the Abbotsford, B.C., grandmother began making banana bread with her own great grandmother’s recipe, hoping to raise money to help orphaned children a world away.

“I wanted to build a home – one home for 30 kids. That was the dream,” Giraud said.

She had travelled to a small village in Uganda called Mpumudde.

There, Giraud said she saw many children with no food and no one to care for them.

“They have nothing and they are all trying to survive,” she said.

She met a local, Edwin Lufafa, who shared her vision to help underprivileged kids.

“He wanted to take some kids in a garbage dump and feed them at Christmas time. I said you get me a picture of that and then we’ll talk.”

They’ve been talking, and helping children, ever since.

But being a senior on a pension, she had no way to come up with the cash she needed.

“I knew I could make a mean banana bread, but everybody said it was really the best they’d ever had,” she recalls.

Since then, she’s baked more than 7,000 loaves of banana bread. Friends and strangers have pitched in to make the total number of loaves more than double that. Save-On-Foods donates the ingredients.

“People call me all over the place,” Giraud explained.

“Can I have 100 loaves? Can I have 50 loaves? One girl, she buys 15 loaves a month. It just grew over 13 years. The word went out, banana bread.”

Not only did she build the home, named Jaaja Barb’s Home of Angels, https://jaajabarbshomeofangels.blogspot.com/ but also a school, medical clinic and church. She is now baking to build a trades school so the children can have a way to make a living after they graduate.

At 76, she hopes her story inspires others.

“I’m no spring chicken anymore. I’m an old lady and a loaf of banana bread, and look at what those two things are doing for so many people,” she said.

“If I can do it, anyone can do it.”

Giraud has no plans to slow down, mixing up hope with each banana bread batch and adding love to every loaf.