At Kai's prodding, I finally gave my blog a real name. I've seen some really clever ones, so please don't judge. I just hope it's at least obvious that I'm referring to one of my favorite childhood series, the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
If you know anything about me, you know that I have a bit of an obsession with pioneers. I'm not talking about space age pioneers, or pioneers of modern medicine - since I was little I wanted to be an American pioneer of the Oregon Trail-traversing order. Mid-nineteenth century, no running water, no electricity, little log cabin, living off the land and carrying out all the hand skills like spinning, sewing, and churning butter that are lost to most modern Americans - that was the dream for a long time. Eventually I acknowledged that, yes, I was glad I hadn't died of pneumonia as a baby, and yes, computers were pretty useful, and yes, in a world of over 6 billion people, it isn't really plausible for everyone to have acreage and cook over a wood fire. But my love of the 'olden days' never really went away (as I'm sure most of you are aware), and suffice it to say that when I was asked at my Peace Corps interview how I would handle the possibility of being placed in a site with no running water or electricity, living in a thatched hut, I essentially told the woman that if I wasn't placed in a site like that, we could forget about the whole thing.
Well, I got my wish, sort of. I've spent a year living in a mud and grass hut, with no running water or electricity, plowing and harvesting by hand, riding on donkey-pulled carts, cooking over an open fire, and washing laundry with a bar of soap and a bucket of water. It has made it difficult, at times, to do my job, that on some level I don't want to change these people's way of life; it's what I always wanted. At other times, it's been frustrating to see how far behind even nineteenth century American farmers they lag - nobody can mend or sew their own clothes, the literacy rate is very low, nobody even has a washboard for the laundry, the tools are of such poor quality, and craftsmanship of any kind is hard to come by... People just seem so much less skilled and driven than I expected.
It's one of the most common complaints among volunteers, that the average Senegalese farmer does not seem to show any initiative in improving his own life. One of the biggest realizations I've come to is just how much a part of our culture the 'American dream' attitude is. Sometimes it seems like, in the way development work is attempted, this attitude is taken for granted - for example, if you hold a free grafting training, you would expect everyone who came to go home and graft trees, or if the villagers get a milling machine from an NGO and it breaks, you would expect them to find a way to fix it, rather than letting the investment go to waste... There are certainly some Senegalese who show initiative and a desire to improve their lives, but many seem to act like the benefits of development work are a given, and refuse to really make any changes in their lives to meet the developers halfway.
Senegalese people will readily acknowledge this to you, too. I can't tell you how many villagers say to me, shaking their heads, 'white people work much harder than black people'. The most common English saying they repeat to me is 'Time is money'. Clearly they are getting the developers' 'hard work = getting ahead' message. But maybe the message is a little anachronistic. They know full well how far they lag behind the developed world and how much they are missing out on - they know they're not pioneers of anything, that no matter how hard they pull up on their bootstraps they'll always be catching up, while they see around them the evidence of the 21st century already in the grasp of Europeans and Americans and their own immigrant relatives.
Well, I'm not trying to be depressing, and I'll keep attempting to make opportunities for individuals to improve their lives in small ways. But on a larger scale, if we are ever going to lessen the divide between rich and poor nations in the interest of global harmony, I don't think relying on the work ethics of those in the most humble circumstances is the way to do it.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Back in the Merry Old Land of Senegal
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Been back in Senegal for a couple of weeks now, and had a lot of fun giving gifts from America. Here's a picture of the little outfits I brought back for Sadio and Aliu. Aliu's got his toy motorcycle there, too. The best gift by far was the Red Cross solar and hand-cranked radio, which works beautifully. It's interesting to see how people here view things that we might call 'green' or 'sustainable' in an appeal to trends or political standpoints, like this radio. They just see it as something that is obviously desirable and superior - 'why would anyone ever use batteries again if they have the money to buy technology like that?' they wonder. It's a good question - we've been using solar powered basic calculators almost exclusively for years, and yet we don't see solar powered cell phones/chargers or radios or even solar panels for homes as anything more than an item for situations where conventional power isn't available (e.g. Red Cross radio), or a sort of statement from people who are 'into' the sustainable movement. Why isn't there unanimous excitement in America for development and improvement of the kinds of technology that make us less dependent on conventional power sources?
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Wopa also had her baby a little while after I had left - a little girl who is my namesake, Diatou! Here's a picture of the romper I brought back for her. There are also some family photos behind her - that day they brought out stacks upon stacks of pictures they had saved from previous volunteers and local photographers and we looked at them for hours. It just seemed like such a universal family thing to do.
By the time I got back, the millet had been harvested, and now every few days the women spend the entire afternoon threshing it. Now all the field work is revolving around the peanut harvest. The men are digging up the peanut plants, letting them dry, and piling them into huge mounds (you can see Usman, our adopted Guinean transient worker, carrying the smaller piles on a big stick). The women and I then spend our mornings in the field picking up the stray peanuts that have been detached from the plants in the course of uprooting. That's a ton of peanuts, and provides for our household's daily peanut sauces. Within the next couple of weeks, some of the rice should be ripe and we'll start harvesting (here's Nene proudly showing off our faro). It'll just be Nene and I, since the young women don't really know how to harvest, according to them, and they also have the millet threshing to keep them busy.
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For the past week I've been in Thies with Tumani Diamanka, the pilot farmer in Sare Gagna, for another training. It was a little disruptive to leave site again so soon, but it's been a good training, and I've gotten to see a bunch of volunteer friends that I missed.
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The pilot farmers learned about grafting, composting, companion vegetable planting, pest treatment, and accounting and budgeting. Here are a few pictures from the classroom and the practical grafting workshop.
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Demba Sidibe, probably the most knowledgeable tree guy in all of Senegal, is our agfo program director. Here he's talking to the pilot farmers about grafting and taking care of mango seedlings.
I think Thies is my favorite city in Senegal, although it would be nice if people here spoke Pulaar so I could communicate. There are many good restaurants here, several educational institutions, pretty neighborhoods... One of our favorite restaurants here is a chicken place that we refer to as 'Chicken Diby'. For approximately $5 you get half a roasted chicken, a salad, and french fries. You can see the guy cooking over the fire behind the restaurant.
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Friday, September 17, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
P.S.
Forgot to mention what some of the pictures are - Djiby graduated high school and passed his big college entrance exam, so our household had a huge party for him (that they had to take out loans for...). Also, a village child brought me a baby bunny that he found in the field, and I had a pet for a few days, that I nursed with cow's milk. Then I came back one days and found him dead...
A Year In
[A year in Senegal, that is, not a year into my service. That won't be for another couple of months, just when I'm getting back from the States. Yes, I'm coming back for a bit at the end of September, and I apologize in advance for not being able to visit everybody, as much as I'd like to...]
A quick synopsis of July is that I spent a lot of time working on the garden at the Sare Bidji health post - planting tons of banana bulbs, seeding moringa, jatropha, baobab,leucena and pigeon pea trees, and outplanting a live fence of sisal around the gardening areas within the health posts walls (it's a pretty big area). The moringa is the miracle tree that I'm sure I've mentioned before - the dried powdered leaves are pretty much a multivitamin, and the seeds have many possibilities for food, oil, etc., although people here mostly just pick a handful of leaves as a last resort addition to flavorless meals, as they have a hint of horseradish. The jatropha is a folk antiseptic, but with real usefulness - I've seen them break off a young branch and dab the milky sap on babies' healing belly buttons. The baobab - that huge tree that is often used to symbolize Senegal or West Africa - has an odd fruit that people love which is high in vitamin C, and the powdered dried leaves are added for flavor in certain dishes.
There is a large section of the health post that I hope to next year use as a demonstration of field crop techniques, and in preparation I planted rows of leucena and pigeon pea to demonstrate alley cropping.
The sisal is a plant that looks kind of like an aloe, and gets huge with little spikes along its fronds (tentacles? leaves?) and makes a good living fence. Everybody in town wanted some of my sisal starts that I had in nursery after getting them near Thies. They only seed every 10 years, so it's hard to find for people.
The bananas I planted for obvious reasons - they're super easy to grow and everybody wants them, but no one seems to have them in my village, allegedly because they don't have a source of starts. This awesome guy from Sare Gagna offered to go to this place that I forget the name of, a ways from here, where everybody grows huge fields of bananas, and got me 30 starts, not expecting any payment. I payed him, and then Jason used his help too. Almost all of the 30 have come up now. It took a long time to dig 30 big holes and mix in compost, and although my 'counterpart' and another friend said they would help, they never showed up.
I had a frustrating week or so when first it looked like all the banana starts were rotten and only 2 or 3 would survive, and next, well-meaning citizens paid for a kid to rototill the entire field crop area where I had leucena and pidgeon pea coming up. They felt really bad, and I reseeded, and it's ok, but sloppier now. And finally the banana leaves are peeking out.
The end of July and all of August so far have been spent working, every morning and afternoon except for Fridays, in the rice 'faro' with my nene and Sadio and Wopa. (Demo just had her baby - a little boy named Nanaman after Nene's dead husband - but she's pretty lazy and probably wouldn't have worked much in the faro anyway.) First we hoed and weeded and seeded the nursery beds, and lately we've been rotating among hoeing, weeding, and pulling up and transplanting rice starts in the flooded faro. It's knee deep mud and water all day, and if we're hoeing, it's essentially head-to-toe mud and water, thanks to splattering. But I find the transplanting more physically tiring because of being in the bent-over position for so long. All in all, though, I've been enjoying labouring in the rice fields - it's basically just getting to play in the mud (and sometimes rain) all day.
The work is not fun and games for those (the majority of people, really) who are fasting for Ramadan. Ramadan started the same day we started going to the faro, and about 2/3 of the way through the men's heavy field work. The requirement is that all healthy, non-pregnant and non-breastfeeding persons must not eat or drink anything from dawn to dusk, every day for a month. This, or you're not a real Muslim. I, like every volunteer, find this very frustrating and obnoxious - to hear complaining all year about how much they are suffering (very little, for most people) and to be nagged for money for medicine and food, only to have them choose to wear out their bodies and/or do very little work, and spend more money than usual on after-dusk treats for a month out of the year... Yesterday I refused to give Djiby aspirin for his splitting headache, telling him that I wouldn't give medicine to fasters, as they knew what discomfort they were in for when they started fasting. I immediately felt very guilty and couldn't look him in the eye for the rest of the evening...but really, I still agree with myself. What's really amazing, and also entirely insane, is the people who fast like this and also work from dawn to dusk in the fields (without a lunch break, since they aren't eating). You have to admire it a little, but it also just makes you cringe.
I held an evening (after the 7:30 Break-fast meal) birthday party for Maimouna on the 22nd, which was a big hit, although it was lacking Maimouna's best friend and sister, Ellie, who's on vacation in Kolda with relatives. I baked cupcakes in the Kolda house, and even found sprinkles and birthday candles! They got soda too, and then the crowning event was playing with the little candles (this is not America, folks. Kids are perfectly welcome to play with fire - they learn pretty quickly what happens when they're not careful).
A quick synopsis of July is that I spent a lot of time working on the garden at the Sare Bidji health post - planting tons of banana bulbs, seeding moringa, jatropha, baobab,leucena and pigeon pea trees, and outplanting a live fence of sisal around the gardening areas within the health posts walls (it's a pretty big area). The moringa is the miracle tree that I'm sure I've mentioned before - the dried powdered leaves are pretty much a multivitamin, and the seeds have many possibilities for food, oil, etc., although people here mostly just pick a handful of leaves as a last resort addition to flavorless meals, as they have a hint of horseradish. The jatropha is a folk antiseptic, but with real usefulness - I've seen them break off a young branch and dab the milky sap on babies' healing belly buttons. The baobab - that huge tree that is often used to symbolize Senegal or West Africa - has an odd fruit that people love which is high in vitamin C, and the powdered dried leaves are added for flavor in certain dishes.
There is a large section of the health post that I hope to next year use as a demonstration of field crop techniques, and in preparation I planted rows of leucena and pigeon pea to demonstrate alley cropping.
The sisal is a plant that looks kind of like an aloe, and gets huge with little spikes along its fronds (tentacles? leaves?) and makes a good living fence. Everybody in town wanted some of my sisal starts that I had in nursery after getting them near Thies. They only seed every 10 years, so it's hard to find for people.
The bananas I planted for obvious reasons - they're super easy to grow and everybody wants them, but no one seems to have them in my village, allegedly because they don't have a source of starts. This awesome guy from Sare Gagna offered to go to this place that I forget the name of, a ways from here, where everybody grows huge fields of bananas, and got me 30 starts, not expecting any payment. I payed him, and then Jason used his help too. Almost all of the 30 have come up now. It took a long time to dig 30 big holes and mix in compost, and although my 'counterpart' and another friend said they would help, they never showed up.
I had a frustrating week or so when first it looked like all the banana starts were rotten and only 2 or 3 would survive, and next, well-meaning citizens paid for a kid to rototill the entire field crop area where I had leucena and pidgeon pea coming up. They felt really bad, and I reseeded, and it's ok, but sloppier now. And finally the banana leaves are peeking out.
The end of July and all of August so far have been spent working, every morning and afternoon except for Fridays, in the rice 'faro' with my nene and Sadio and Wopa. (Demo just had her baby - a little boy named Nanaman after Nene's dead husband - but she's pretty lazy and probably wouldn't have worked much in the faro anyway.) First we hoed and weeded and seeded the nursery beds, and lately we've been rotating among hoeing, weeding, and pulling up and transplanting rice starts in the flooded faro. It's knee deep mud and water all day, and if we're hoeing, it's essentially head-to-toe mud and water, thanks to splattering. But I find the transplanting more physically tiring because of being in the bent-over position for so long. All in all, though, I've been enjoying labouring in the rice fields - it's basically just getting to play in the mud (and sometimes rain) all day.
The work is not fun and games for those (the majority of people, really) who are fasting for Ramadan. Ramadan started the same day we started going to the faro, and about 2/3 of the way through the men's heavy field work. The requirement is that all healthy, non-pregnant and non-breastfeeding persons must not eat or drink anything from dawn to dusk, every day for a month. This, or you're not a real Muslim. I, like every volunteer, find this very frustrating and obnoxious - to hear complaining all year about how much they are suffering (very little, for most people) and to be nagged for money for medicine and food, only to have them choose to wear out their bodies and/or do very little work, and spend more money than usual on after-dusk treats for a month out of the year... Yesterday I refused to give Djiby aspirin for his splitting headache, telling him that I wouldn't give medicine to fasters, as they knew what discomfort they were in for when they started fasting. I immediately felt very guilty and couldn't look him in the eye for the rest of the evening...but really, I still agree with myself. What's really amazing, and also entirely insane, is the people who fast like this and also work from dawn to dusk in the fields (without a lunch break, since they aren't eating). You have to admire it a little, but it also just makes you cringe.
I held an evening (after the 7:30 Break-fast meal) birthday party for Maimouna on the 22nd, which was a big hit, although it was lacking Maimouna's best friend and sister, Ellie, who's on vacation in Kolda with relatives. I baked cupcakes in the Kolda house, and even found sprinkles and birthday candles! They got soda too, and then the crowning event was playing with the little candles (this is not America, folks. Kids are perfectly welcome to play with fire - they learn pretty quickly what happens when they're not careful).
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
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