Living in a Microwave

It was confirmed this morning that living in Senegal is like living in a microwave. “How?” you ask? Well, you know those plastic syrup containers that can be microwaved to heat the syrup up and then have a little heat sensor to tell you when the syrup is hot? Yeah, I got one of those in a package recently so this morning Cora, Jen, and I decided to make an amazing Greek salad egg scramble (with our left-over Greek salad from last night) and French toast with French-pressed coffee (going all European for breakfast). When we were setting the table I pulled out my syrup and was (half-seriously, half-jokingly) lamenting how we don’t have a microwave to heat up the syrup, Cora suggested I leave the syrup in the sun for a few minutes and see if it would quickly heat up a little bit. I knew the sun was intense here, but I had no idea how intense: within less than a minute the heat sensor read “HOT!” So, some things we can conclude from this experience are that
1) the sun is really intense here, so intense, in fact, that
2) living in Senegal is (almost) like living in a microwave – that is running; and
3) you should send me syrup in a package because we’re going to
4) be making French toast and pancakes all the time!

Pulaar Goat Herders

I was out in the bush the other day with Tomsir, the guy that I tutor in English, not too far from Kayemor collecting tree seeds (because Tomsir said he knew where to find tree seeds for this one kind of tree that has thorns and so it’s a good tree to plant to make a live fence) when some Pulaar (one of the ethnic groups in Senegal) goat herders came by with all their goats. They generally are not very social people nor very educated because they spend so much time out in the bush herding their animals around, so they were super interested to see me – a white person – out in the bush. They didn’t speak very good Wolof (which is surprising since the major ethnic group in the area is Wolof, but then again they’re out in the bush so much with just themselves that they don’t interact with other people very much so they don’t really need to know Wolof very well), but the oldest guy spoke enough for us to communicate about why we were out in the bush. After a little while of chatting, Tomsir suggested I take a picture of them, so I asked them if I could take a picture of them, and they loved the idea – they loved it so much, in fact, that they wanted to try to gather all their goats together so I could get a picture of them with all their goats. Trying to gather well over 100 goats with only 4 people is not an easy task. They pulled off a branch from the tree that we were collecting seeds from because the goats really like the seeds (which is one reason I’ve been having a hard time finding these seeds) and tried to entice them to gather in that way (see pictures below). Once that was done, the oldest guy wanted a picture of just himself with his best goats, so (in the last picture below) he’s holding 3 goats by the horns. The youngest guy also wanted to be in the pic (though the oldest guy didn’t want him there) – so he came running with their youngest goat. What a random experience.

Warning: Construction in Progress

Construction on Kayemor’s seed storage facility has officially begun! The building is coming along quite quickly, actually, considering the sun and heat make manual labor almost unbearable for several hours in the early afternoon.

Here’s a picture of Kate (the PCV in Kayemor before me, holding the official paperwork – the Peace Corps symbol is almost discernable), Elimane (far right; the entrepreneur who designed the building and is overseeing construction of it), the men and woman on the board of directors (there is another woman on the board, but she couldn't make it to that meeting) for the Peñc Mi organization that requested the facility on behalf of the people of Kayemor and surrounding villages, and me. We’re standing on the original site for the facility – the location has since moved south about 300 meters to be closer to the main road running through Kayemor and because the soil was a little more solid there.

Here are pictures of the new site for the facility a few days before construction began.

Construction in progress:

Meetings, meetings, and MORE meetings

Ever since getting back to Kayemor after our Inter-Service Training (IST), I feel like I have done nothing but sit in meetings. This obviously is not true, but I have sat in on A LOT of meetings. I’m not complaining, though, because most of these meetings have been organized specifically to help me with my work. When I first got back to Kayemor, I met with my host father and several other men and women that are involved in development work through “Peñc mi,” the local organization that works with Symbiose, a local NGO that is associated with and financially supported by the Austrian-based organization Horizont3000. In these first couple meetings, we talked about the work that Kate, the PCV in Kayemor before me, had done and how I could build upon that work (such as expanding the seed extension program to more farmers and villages, and supervising the construction and use of the seed storage facility that Kate had started raising money for when she was a PCV), as well as what new things I could do (such as start a school garden and a large, central tree nursery in Kayemor). As far as expanding the seed extension program, we decided it would be helpful if one of Peñc mi’s “animateurs” (essentially a person that has been trained in how to lead a village meeting [they have them pretty often here]) would go with me to each of the 23 villages in the “communauté rurale de Kayemor” (i.e., the small region of which Kayemor is the “capital” for lack of a better word) and have a meeting with the villagers, so I could meet them, so the animateur could explain my role in the community as a PCV and explain the seed extension program (since not all the farmers are necessarily aware of it), and so the villagers could select one farmer to act as the village “captain” or “relay” between me and all the other farmers in the village who are in the seed extension program. This relay will get special training from me on all the crops I will extend through the program (such as proper planting timing and spacing, weeding timing, integrated pest management techniques, etc.) so he/she is familiar with all of them (even if he/she will only actually farm one him/herself) and then the relay will be able to help the other farmers in his/her village if they have questions or concerns about the crop they’re growing. This is important because I will be extending seeds to over 100 farmers in over 15 villages, and, no matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to visit every farmer as often as I should (like every week or every other week), so the relay will (as the title suggests) act as a relay between me and the farmers – relaying information, questions, concerns, and suggestions back and forth. This will also build the capacity of local farmers, which is a primary goal of Peace Corps and a key to the sustainability of the program. Once this plan was agreed upon, we made a plan of action and chose which village I would go to on which day with which animateur. So far I have been to a handful of villages and have found the meetings very helpful.

As far as the other meetings are concerned, I had a 2-day-long meeting in Nioro that was organized by Symbiose because they are expanding the number of communities in which they work, and so they wanted to gather all the community leaders from all the communities they will be working in now to explain their new program and allow people to network. You can learn more about Symbiose and Horizont3000 here: (you can use google to translate these websites into English)
http://base.afrique-gouvernance.net/fr/corpus_dph/fiche-dph-735.html
http://base.afrique-gouvernance.net/fr/corpus_organismes/fiche-organismes-156.html
http://www.horizont3000.at/

Other meetings I have attended have been lead by my host father in nearby villages regarding environmental concerns that the community in general has – namely concerns about the rapid rate of deforestation of the area (because everyone uses the trees for firewood to cook as well as for building fences and tools, and very few people plant new trees and those that are planted are often eaten by cows and goats – this is a big problem in Africa in general as well as the rest of the developing world) and the poor quality of the soil (because of deforestation, erosion, over-grazing, and continuous agriculture without adding soil amendments such as manure). Concerns about climate change were brought up, too, though they obviously didn’t use that word – the older men and women just talked about how the hot season is hotter than it used to be and how the cool season isn’t nearly as cool as it used to be and how the rains come later than they used to. Once the concerns were expressed, the villages talked about how they can address their environmental concerns by planting more trees (hence the importance of a big, central tree nursery in Kayemor for all the surrounding villages), using crop rotations, using manure to fertilize their fields, etc. I know that a lot of this was probably just talk, but talk is certainly the place to start, and the fact that they all recognize these problems means that they will hopefully be really motivated to try to make some changes to make things better.