Fritter and WAIST the hours...

Kolda's WAIST team - 'Space Corps'
Avatars, storm troopers, Jedi, Lady Gaga....you name it

I just got back from a simultaneously fun, crazy, exhausting, and productive several weeks in Dakar. First on the agenda was to take the GRE. Predictably, I did well on the English and essay sections, and terribly on the math ones.  I had the company of a few other peace corps volunteers, both for study sessions and at the actual test, which was nice.

Next came the agroforestry summit, in Thies.  We got to see a fish farm and a chicken farm, learn about fruit tree pests and trench some young mango plants to be grafted next season for the master farmers. We also exchanged seeds, which is always to be looked forward to.  I got a huge rice sack full of sisal starts for the Kolda region, which I'd been hoping for since last year.  Sisal is such an easy and great live fencing shrub; everyone's been asking for it, because there's no seed source near here that I'm aware of.

From Thies we all got PC vehicle ride to Dakar for a day of inter-regional and other non-governmental organizations networking with volunteers.  It didn't really turn out to be very useful for me, personally.  We got to meet several new Kolda volunteers, though, who have been relocated from Niger after the program was shut down there.  Minnie and Dan - agfo and health, respectively, I believe - are awesome, and we all think our region's volunteer group just keeps getting better and better (and bigger and bigger).

Palpatine and Vader are just like the rest of us, really

Leia up to bat

Han, Leia, Obi-wan, Yoda, and...
somehow Vader snuck into the Good Guys photo

Finally, after this networking day came the event that we daydream about all year - the West African invitational softball tournament (forgive me if I explained all about WAIST last year already). Volunteers from Senegal, the Gambia, Mali, Cape Verde, and Niger, as well as American expat and Senegalese leagues came together for three days of softball. Some teams are competetive; some are complete slapstick spectacles of rowdy indifference to the rules. Each team comes up with a theme and dresses up for games, so as you can imagine, attempts at outrageous costumery are often more spirited than shows of athletic ability.  When we're not playing, we're enjoying American food and beer, and generally having a great time in the pool and on the dance floor (there's a party at a different venue every night).

Kolda won two games - two more than our region has ever won in the history of being a region!

I've spent the past few days recuperating in the Kolda house, and getting some agfo seed collection and other work done. It's nice to be back in a city where I can bike everywhere, or pay a $1 cab fare, unlike Dakar's outrageous traffic and prices. The only downside is the 100F-106F weather....it was still nice and cool in Dakar.  But good to be home!

Shelling moringa oleifera seed at the Kolda house

 

....2011 has begun!

Usman the Guinean, left us after
he got paid for his peanuts.  He
says he'll move back permanently with
his wife in a few months! We hope so!

It's been a lazy few weeks in Sare Fode, just watering the garden and studying for the GRE.  It's this time of year that makes me appreciate Senegal and this job - not terribly hot, but hot enough you can grow anything you want to; and since it's not the main agroforestry season, and it's always culturally acceptable here to lay around all day, I get to do a few hours' work in the morning and evening, and then lounge about and read all day.  When else will I ever have such an awesome job!?  At least that's one way to look at it.

Regional strategy 'retreat'

There have been a few events to break up the monotony of watering and GRE prep - our region had a 'regional strategy' planning meeting recently, where we shared what we're all working on, and what our goals are, as work sectors and as a region. I stayed after that to write a grant proposal for a palm reforestation project in a 10 kilometer stretch of seasonal floodplain in our rural community.  This will hopefully be an inter-regional cooperative project, taking place during the rainy season, and resulting in several thousand improved variety of oil palms being replanted.

See the couple lonely palms?  This will all be replanted,
inchallah.

Working in Tumani's garden

A week or so later, Massaly (my supervisor, and the pilot farmer project administrator) came down to Tumani's demonstration site in Sare Gagna for a workday, in which we dug improved beds and outplanted all of Tumani's nursery starts in companion planting formations.  There were around 10-15 people there, volunteers and local villagers, and we all worked pretty much straight from 9:30-5:30 or so.  It was an incredibly productive and fun day.

Nene and I watched from the village

It's the dry season, and people are also burning their fields - a combination which often leads to bush fires, like the one we had a couple of weeks ago.  It got so close to our village that everyone, men and women alike were rushing out with buckets of water.  It turned and went off towards Kolda, but was a little nerve wracking for a few minutes.



I'd like to make a request of anyone who is thinking about sending me anything, or doing anything to help me out here - instead, I'd love any donation, however small, to Jessie Seiler's Peace Corps Partnership grant for library books for Senegalese schools.  Sare Bidji will receive a portion of those books.  Thank you! :)
The link is: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-164