I started another garden today. Things that I learned as a little kid are really starting to be enforced- if at first you fail, try, try again. In this case, it applies both to the demise of my garden behind my hut and to the minor failure at teaching soil amendments the other day. Before I went to Sokone for language seminar, I went out to the field with the women in the village who were starting their plots. They were digging, and I decided that it was time to take initiative and try to explain soil amendments and their benefits before they get everything planted. I tried to speak up, and some of them clearly had no idea what I was saying, so it turned into a random mess of some women trying to throw green leaves into a pile to just mix into the soil at random. My uncle came over to me and said some people didn’t want to do that because it was extra work, and I tried to show that it really wasn’t that hard to strip some leaves from some trees and put them into the ground. In an awkward turn of events, somebody then got a phone call that someone in the village had died and everyone had to go home. The plots still haven’t been finished. Now, however, I am learning from my mistakes and I am making some big compost piles for myself, pepiniering in an area where there’s water and good soil, and in a public location where it will be easy to teach and discuss with people. This doesn’t mean I won’t retry planting in my backyard- it’s really convenient when I don’t feel like leaving my hut to just say I have work to do in my garden here. It’s also probably the most control I have over any one location since it is protected from goats and locked away from little annoying children. A public garden space has its benefits though- it’s close to outplanting sites if I want to pepiniere some live fencing species for the women’s garden next to it, and it’s next to the women’s plots that they had started so they will have to walk by my garden every time they go to work there and see my moringa beds I plan to plant- free advertisement of the fact that it is, in fact, important for them. At least that’s how it works in my mind.
Speaking of moringa, I will be traveling into Kaolack for a moringa tourney meeting in a couple of days, and this being after I just got back from my language seminar in Sokone. It is amazing that now that the 5-week challenge is over, I really am out of site a lot. Thankfully my counterpart/dad Ousman understands; I applogized that I had to travel so much the other day and he was perfectly ok with it, explaining that he knew I was learning and the village would ultimately be able to benefit from it. I can’t claim to love spending as much time as possible in the village, but traveling so much takes its toll on you when you are trying to form relationships with people and when it’s a minimum of waking up at 4 am and traveling on an overcrowded bush taxi for 4 hours just to get into the regional house. I justify it by thinking that I will have some bragging rights among other, less-remote volunteers later on. That, or I’ll just start complaining all the time.
On a completely different note, did anyone make New Year’s resolutions? Mine is to make it through the year. This year is bound to change me in ways I can’t even imagine and present challenges that may be harder than anything I’ve ever had to face, so wish me luck. Here goes, 2011.
~E
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