Thursday, May 20, 2010

You know it's a good day when...

you go to the bank to make a withdrawal and you see your balance has miraculously risen by several thousand dollars. Especially when you know that means you will get to make some villagers very happy in the next few days, and not have to worry about finding work to do. In other words, the USAID food security money for both my garden and Tumani's demo site came in yesterday, and now we can get to work! Alhamdulilah.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Where did April and half of May go?

Well, let's see if I can answer myself - at the beginning of April, I finished writing the SPA grant proposal for chain-link fencing for the community garden. There's already a well and an area where they used to garden successfully, until animals broke down the barbed wire fencing and they stopped using the space. The proposal was approved, and after some more frustrating back and forth between Sare Fode and Kolda for various signature pages and other minute changes here and there to the proposal, the funds have been requested by admin from stateside and we are now twiddling our thumbs and hoping that they arrive before the rains start in the next week or two. Similarly, Shames submitted all quotes and paperwork for the pilot farmer program, and I signed off to receive the funds, since he's on vacation in the U.S. this month, so now Tumani and I are also crossing our fingers that the money comes any day. Once the rains start, people don't have time to do any extra work beyond their fields, thus prices go way up and/or the work just doesn't get done. Also, transportation is a challenge because of flooding/mud.
So, while we have been biding our time, we've also been doing things - I got really excited about planting trees and starting a garden within the walls of the health post in Sare Bidji, and while there isn't a lot started yet, I've got a few guys who are also enthusiastic about it, and water for me when I'm gone. One of them also helped me dig holes for bananas. I've got a great compost pile going there, and a papaya nursery that just sprouted last week. I also planted sunflower seeds and watermelon in some raised beds near the medical buildings, but at least half the starts got munched.
The watermelon in our family's garden, on the other hand, is one of two surviving things there after we had a beautiful garden going, and then goats got in, even after Djiby thought he'd fixed the barbed wire. Goats are the most harmful creatures here! And people only eat them once or twice a year, it's so ridiculous. My sisal nursery is still doing ok, although it got munch a bit too. The next plan for the family garden is to fence off, with bamboo fencing, a six-by-six meter area within the larger garden and hold a 'permagarden' training there for the village, after which we'll have a little garden all set to go. [Permagardening is the PC/USAID food-security idea that you can see in a few of the pictures I posted from the training Maya hosted in Kolda recently, and that I took my Nene to. It is meant to be a small house garden that maximizes how much can be grown in a given space and uses water efficiently. You dig contour walls where you plant perennials, leave pathways that channel water to the beds and to reservoirs in the corners, and you dig the beds very deeply and mix in azadarachta indica leaves, wood ash and charcoal dust, and manure or compost.] Nene was really excited about this after we went to Maya's training, so we're going to shoot for eventually having one for every house in Sare Fode (that's only like 12).
Over the past month I also helped create tree nurseries with Seidou in Sare Sambachika and Tumani in Sare Gagna. Seidou's is off to a slow start, because he's so busy with his job that takes him all over. Tumani, of course, has more experience with gardening and nurseries, so our nursery of cassia siamea (for a windbreak for the new pilot farmer demo plot) is looking beautiful. We also just started a nursery last week of a live-fencing species, acacia nilotica, which hasn't sprouted yet. He's so much fun to work with, and talk to. Really intelligent and ambitious.
A couple of disappointments were the citrus nurseries I tried to start with Boola, an old woman in Sare Fode, and Arfang, a young man in Sare Bidji. The seeds were old and I was skeptical from the start that they would sprout, but since our training instructors had harvested them and given them to us as ideal citrus rootstock seed, I thought I'd give them a try. But citrus seed is notorious for not storing well, as well as for having a low germination rate anyway. Oh well.
So for the past few days I've been in Kolda to welcome the new stage of volunteers to the region, and then I got sick, so I've been here a couple extra days. Most days I don't really have anything scheduled, so this wouldn't be a big deal, but I actually was supposed to do the Sare Fode permagarden training and also a garden training for the schoolchildren and teachers in Sare Demba Mballo (nearby Sare Bidji- the teachers asked me to come), so this has been kind of a pain. I still have diarrhea, but I feel better today.
As much as I'd like a few more weeks to work on nurseries, I'm really excited for the rains to start! I miss the rain so much. But not as much as I miss you guys... ;)

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Captions

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April 2010

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