Noor be new na! (Hot season is here!) May 2014

It is currently the hottest part of the year here in my corner of Senegal, and that means too hot for me to make coherent thoughts or blog posts.  I figured a fun alternative would be a photo essay (of sorts) of what I've been seeing these last three weeks in my village.

WHAT DO YOU SEE IN SENEGAL IN THE HOT SEASON? 

Peace Corps Volunteers biking with strange cargo on their bikes

My friends J.J. and Kait about to bike 30 km on dirt paths back to site.  J.J. had been gone a while so he wanted to buy his family a nice present... like a chicken to eat the day after he got back.  Only in Senegal, you can't buy nicely packages chicken breasts or frozen chickens.  You can only buy live ones.  So J.J. headed off to the market, bought the chicken, and attached it (quite creatively, might I add) to his bike for the ride.  

Another of my colleagues, Allie, could be spotted this hot season biking back from our road town where she'd bought a hose for her men's garden.  Notice the ingenious positioning of the object!  Allowing for ease of movement and minimizing the cumbersome weight.  

Erin's tree nursery, with special appearances by her little helpers (aka, my brothers)

So new trees are hardier and have a higher survival rate, we PCVs extend the 'tree sack' or other pre-rainy season nursery techniques.  You get the trees started in a controlled, shaded, protected environment before transplanting them after the first rains.  I helped with several live fences (thorny or poisonous tree species that deter pests and last longer than fencing) for gardens, trees within gardens, and cashew orchards that we are establishing in the area.  My personal nursery has cashew, two types of pigeon pea, citrus, Luciana, Meringa, and papaya.    

Amet (age 2), with cashew seeds.

Ada (age 3), planting away!

 Abibo (age 5), making holes for the pigeon pea seeds.

My flamboyant, a shade tree with red leaves.  

Napping boys in my hut in the afternoons! 

Mom!  I don't nap in your room, I never sleep!

Yeah!  We just come in and tear things apart, we don't sleep!  Sleep is for...

Ok boys, I called your bluff.

All the cool kids playing 'UNO' after I broke out the cards 

I must confess, I was impressed the kids caught on so quickly since my explanations left much to be desired.  I don't know the word for 'reverse' in Wolof, or 'skip,' so I named these "mix up!" and "don't play!" respectively.  They love to scream those out when they lay it down, "ABALAI!  DON'T PLAY!"

Even the elusive teenagers have been spotted with the cards, though you have to stalk them to get any evidence.

 Huge piles of 'demb' rinds

My older mom, Awa Top, peeling and halving demb fruit.  At the peak of the hot season there are space pickings for fruits, vegetables, or leaves to cook.  Thankfully, the local bush fruit called 'demb' is in season and every woman prepares a couple pounds of it for the sauce on our nightly ground millet.

Another of those huge piles!  On the stick bed, you can see dehydrating fruits.  You can either serve them stewed or dehydrated.  I much prefer the stewed version as they soak up the sauce they cook in.  The dehydrated version is like a dry rub of Senegalese spices... on dry ground millet.  Not quite to my taste, but interesting nonetheless.

 Endless Shelling of Peanuts

With the end of the peanut harvest last December, I joined the village in the months of peanut shelling that ensued.  I acquired calluses on my fingers and learned how to conjugate a lot of basic Wolof verbs back then.  I thought that was behind us, but it was not to be!  Here in the peanut basin, it was unusual for us to take a couple months off peanut shelling.  Now we are back at it, shelling and sorting the second you sit down so the best peanuts can be planted when the rains come.

Sifting through the peanuts.

 

 A distinct lack of vegetables

Nothing is growing.  It is almost impossible to preserve fruits and vegetables here.  Hence my role here to combat food insecurity.  A perfect example of this is my lunch, maffe.  White rice with a ground peanut and hot pepper sauce.  Not all that nutritious, but give us a couple more months and that sauce will have carrots, potatoes, cabbage, eggplant, and other vegetables again.  

 My 'wannek' garden

Everywhere else, it's brown and only trees and old bushes with deep tap roots have green leaves on them.  I'm trying out my green thumb in my backyard (wannek) and these are my pre-rainy season nurseries thus far.

A cucumber nursery.

Banana, basil, cucumbers, and mint.

A spaghetti squash nursery, I hope it survives this Senegalese heat!

  New huts being built

This is the slowest time of the year for farmers.  You can start some nurseries and prepare your fields, but it is too hot for even Senegalese to do too much work.   Instead, this is the time that jobs usually secondary to agriculture get done.  Like building huts.  This is a typical hut in an impoverished community like mine.  Bricks made out of mud (not very stable, especially in the rainy season), woods beams for the roof, and thatch to keep the weather out.  People with more money build with concrete and metal, but even those families have at least one or two of these typical huts in their compounds.

Making thatch!  After laying out the tall grass, it is wrapped handful by handful in strips of tree bark to make these long lines of thatch which get wrapped around the roofs.

 Matching Outfits

'Mama Yassine' teaching kids how to make faces

Part of my job description?  No.  But it was too hot to work.  Call it a 'cultural exchange.'  It's been so hot we haven't been able to do much but sit around and make faces at each other.  I've learned (and taught) quite a bit.

Petite, the latest addition to our family

When we adopted my puppy Yussa Ndor, one of his litter mates started hanging around the village.  This last month, my brother decided he would adopt her too.  She's much sweeter than Yussa Ndor, and better behaved.  The two of them are always up to no good... or napping.  

Malaria Education

I helped with two malaria education programs at different schools this past month.  With rainy season comes standing water.  With standing water comes mosquitoes.  With mosquitoes comes malaria.  Every individual in my family has had malaria.  In 2010,  over 660,000 people died from malaria- most of them in Africa.  The programs we did discussed malaria prevention (mosquito nets (proper usage and care), limiting standing water) and  treatment (go to the health post!).  The program was fun because it incorporated soccer, so the kids were pretty excited about it!

Usually, boys don't wash clothes or mosquito nets.  We decided to do some impromptu gender equality work and taught the boys to wash as well.

Checking for holes in need of sewing up.

A mini-training on tree nurseries 

This past week, I held a small training with the seven women of the Escale Women's Group.  I taught them how to make tree sacks, protect the nursery, and decide which trees were best for their community garden.

Sifting the dirt and manure for the tree sacks.

Filling the sacks.

Putting the sacks in the nursery hole, protected with wood ash and neem leaves.

Hot Pepper Nurseries 

Hot pepper is one of the most coveted, and profitable, crops in Senegal.  Most women have their own hot pepper gardens and this is the time to start the nurseries!  They prepare the soil, plant the seeds, keep them under mosquito-type netting propped up with sticks to protect from insects, covered in grass to protect from the sun, and water daily.  When the rains come and the peppers are big enough, they'll be transplanted to the river garden.  

Basic Gardening Workshop, April 2014

April 2014, Basic Gardening Workshop

At the beginning of this month, I had 'mon grand debut' of large work projects.  The majority of my work is small scale, such talking one-on-one to farmers.  And this is usually more effective than cumbersome, problem-laden, large scale projects.  However, after the past several months of language, cultural, and on-the-job West African agriculture studies I was able to gage the local gaps in gardening knowledge.  I coordinated with my neighboring volunteers to organize a large scale workshop.  It was a lot of work and included quite a few nervous planning moments, but was a resounding success!

From the beginning, my workshop was a joint effort between my site-mate, Sara, and I.  We jointly wrote a grant to cover food costs and convinced our counterparts that the 'local community contribution' should be transportation to the event.  We identified gardening groups in five communities and approached them about sending their group leaders to the workshop.  I wrote lesson plans and wrangled enough volunteers to teach all the lessons.  And perhaps most importantly, I spent several evening with my counterpart, Saliou, discussing how, what, why we would be teaching.  The overarching goal of my work here is capacity building.  Increasing agricultural capacity.  Income-generating capacity.  Nutrition capacity.  And, for my counterpart who is already such a respected local sage, teaching capacity.

The day of the workshop started by me helping unpack everything my village had rented from the larger village nearby for the training.  We unpacked plastic chairs (there are normally a total of 6 chairs in my village), cutlery (just tablespoons to eat with), and lots of big pots and bowls to serve lunch in.  As we finished, charette after charette load (horse and cartloads) of local gardening leaders showed up.  We breakfasted on fresh bread and pigeon pea (a mixture between a pea and a bean) from our own garden.  It was a brilliant way to start the training as everyone loved the peas and their production became a common talking point throughout the day. 

Us serving coffee, bread, and peas for breakfast.

Then came the most terrifying moment for me.  I had to make the opening remarks...in Wolof... to over 50 people.  Even though I've been here for six months and am pretty decent at learning languages, this was daunting.  But I quickly got through it and allowed my local leaders to get some practice at teaching.  Saliou introduced himself and our garden.  Omar, my master farmer, introduced the role of Peace Corps volunteers.  The president of my women's group introduced the work of my village's women in the garden.  The most difficult part of the day was splitting the fifty participants into five groups.  I had already seen how difficult this is to do at previous trainings, as it is an entirely foreign concept to Senegalese.  Thankfully, Saliou and Omar were familiar with the concept and divided the groups- each to be led by a woman from my village's women group. 

Introducing the workshop.

Through my past months of interacting with gardening groups, I learned that farmers here have a great deal of knowledge but there are some gaps in the 'basic' gardening techniques Peace Corps advocates for.  So I drew up lesson plans and the stations were as follows;

1.  Garden Beds, taught by me

-amending soil

-good location for beds

-ideal sizing for beds

-why intensive garden beds are better than scattered planting

Activity: double digging half of a bed

2.  Garden Bed maintenance, taught by Kait

-proper watering techniques (homemade watering cans instead of throwing buckets of water onto the soil, which hardens it)

-mulching

-weeding (a practice rarely used here)

Activity: mulching a bed

3.  Intercropping, taught by Hanna

-why intercrop

-creating microclimates

-what plants can be intercropped?

4.  Composting, taught by Sara

-why compost?

-how to compost?

Activity: making compost

5.  Trees in the garden, taught by Allie

-shade

-erosion control

-wind break

-nitrogen fixing

I had been quite nervous about my ability to teach in Wolof.  Especially teaching gardening techniques to farmers... but it went so well.  The participants were engaged, discussed how they could take this new knowledge back to their gardening groups, and were always willing to help me if I didn't know the exact word for describing 'nitrogen fixing.'

The workshop was a success on multiple levels.  First and foremost, we were able to educate and excite Senegalese farmers about gardening techniques.  We know that we reached people because several groups gave me their phone numbers and since then we have organized follow up visits by me to their gardens.  Perhaps one of the most touching moments was when the leaders of several gardening groups that had been hesitant or unwilling to listen to my advice previously saw how successful the techniques we advocate are, and asked us volunteers to come teach in their gardens next garden season.  I also gained a lot of confidence in my ability to organize, teach, and be efficient in Senegal.  Finally, my counterpart gained quite a bit of organizational experience which will be useful for future teaching.

                                                                                                              

The workshop was also a success in terms of Senegalese socialization!  Let me rhapsodize about lunch.  If a community is hosting a workshop like this, it is customary to provide one or more meals.  The grant we wrote covered both breakfast and lunch, and what a lunch it was!  The women in my village demonstrated their "spicy hands" (translation= good cooks) by cooking the most delicious meal I've had in Senegal yet.  From the massive pots and bowls big enough to hold toddlers came ceebu yapp (rice and meat).  A succulent layer of oily rice was topped by goat, an untold amount of vegetables, onion sauce, and even hard boiled eggs! It was such an amazing meal that I even caught one of our visitors filming it on her cell phone. 

 

At the end of lunch, we handed out certificates to the participants.  These certificates are treated as we treat our high school, college, and other major diplomas or certificates.  In an area with limited education, I'm almost daily pulled aside by some farmer to see the collection of certificates they have from attending workshops.  It was such a success, with some of the participants (or should I say new friends?) actually hugging me! 

We ended the workshop by hanging out with my friends and some Senegalese dancing.  The women of my village told me that, while the workshop had been going well so far, the best way to ensure its success was to bring out the recently washed lunch bowls, pound on them, and engage in some high-kicking, quick-stepping dancing.  So I did.  I flailed my arms.  I kicked my legs.  I laughed with my community and new friends.  I was celebrating a day of true success! 

Not my best dancing, but you get the general idea!