Mangrove Madness

Sometimes I find that I’m so busy it’s hard to stay on top of everything going on here, and some days it just stops and I’m back to being bored again. You can never really fall into a routine. The past week I was up in Thies teaching the new stage for a day, then traveled through Kaolack and onto Toubacouta for a mangrove reforestation, and now I’m back to site for a week before continuing onto Dakar for an English camp and my midservice exam. These days, I live in this perpetual state of disbelief; it’s been over a year already in country, I still have a year left to go, I get to go home for vacation in a few months, I’m teaching the new stage and becoming a second-year volunteer, running meetings and actively planning projects and trainings. You never quite get over these things.

Peace Corps has made me, however, one of the world’s greatest travelers, because I can be stuck in a car for long periods of time and not notice it, even when squished in the back of a sept-place with large Senegalese woman on either side of me and breathing in fumes. Podcasts of “This American Life” and “Radiolab” do help matters, but when it’s over and I still have to bike 30 km over a dirt road back to site, I don’t blink an eye. Traveling in America will be heaven for me when this is all over.

At any rate, training was enjoyable, and I got to try my hand at teaching an hour-long session and using my experiences as teaching tools. I probably was a bit nervous at first, because at one point a trainee raised his hand and jokingly asked “Do you always talk this fast? You’re not from California, I assume.” I slowed down after that. Overall, it went well, and I then got to take advantage of a free afternoon in Thies to go buy stuff at the toubab stores downtown.

The mangrove reforestation went swimmingly as well. To save money in my travels, I camped out at one of the campemonts where the Tobuacouta volunteer lives. Some other volunteers were staying in a campemont with a pool, and the people working there let us all come over and use it, so everyone hung out in the pool at night and caught up. The reforestation itself involved a trip to the delta, an hour long boat-ride out to the reforestation area and a couple of hours of sticking mangrove seeds in the mud out in the sun. It’s more fun that it sounds, but also very sunscreen-intensive. There were large groups of kids that were enthusiastically running around and sticking the seeds in the ground as fast as they could, which limited the work that we had to do, and the whole event culminated in a water fight and some sharing of some boisson. It was a pretty successful day.

Now I’m just in transition. Outplanting is done, the rainy season is starting to wind down, I’m waiting for the teachers to get back to start the school gardens up again, and I’m planning some other tourney-type of projects with the doctor and some other volunteers that I’ll write about in the coming months. For the time being, my days consist of reading, playing guitar, blogging, and getting caught in the rain in Pape’s field. Fun times.

~E

Trainings and such

Wow busy week. Tuesday I conducted a training for the women’s group to get them to outplant their pepiniere that they made a while back and promptly forgot about, Wednesday I outplanted all morning with one of my farmers, yesterday we did the moringa tourney part 2 teaching about nutrition and how to use moringa powder, and today Garrison and I finally got the pump in my village up and running, once and for all (inchallah.) All of a sudden it’s Friday. Funny how you forget how time goes by fast when you’re busy.

The women’s group day went smoothly- it’s a weight off my shoulders knowing that several hundred trees will actually make it into the ground this year and all that work will not have gone to waste. Now I’m hoping that they all see the value of the work they were doing once the trees finally start to take, and we’ll be able to get everything done sooner next year and not put it off until after Ramadan is over. Working together with some of the kids from the student association in Saloum Diane was really helpful. They got here much later than expected so we didn’t get the training started until around 10:30 or so, but this is Senegal, and therefore the only thing you can be certain of is that nothing will ever start on time.

The exact same problem occurred yesterday in Saloum Diane. People are not used to being told to get their act together, so the whole idea of rushing is a foreign concept. You can even see it in the way they walk- they sort of just saunter along not really caring about where they are going. Granted, I know plenty of Senegalese people who understand the concept of timeliness, but they are all generally the educated ones who have gone to school and been in trouble at some point in their lives for being late. Therefore, my perspective on this country is a tad bit skewed by the isolation of the village life. But I digress…

Once the moringa training got underway, it was actually quite successful. The doctor from our Poste de Sante (health post) came to the event and helped to translate our sketchy wolof into understandable wolof and was able to take into account cultural knowledge and get the point across better than we would be able to. The training was just a talk in a classroom about what vitamins are, what each one does, and how to incorporate them into your diet using moringa powder. We demonstrated how to make the powder with some dried leaves and pestle and mortar, and then we asked some women to participate and help us cook a standard Senegalese porridge called Rui. We then put the powder they made into the porridge to show that it doesn’t change the taste at all but it is much more nutritious.

Overall, I think we got the point across pretty well, but I still wonder how many people are actually consistently going to put in the effort to change their diet and add moringa powder. The general culture in Senegal is that you don’t do a lot more work than you have to, and this represents another task that the toubabs are asking them to do. Garrison and I were chatting yesterday and we realized that even if every single person in that training taught every other person in the village about moringa powder and they all made an effort to use it, how much would that change the quality of their life? It’s basically the same thing as taking vitamins, and I know people in the states who take vitamins and people who don’t care, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that one group is happier than the other. Still, we do the best we can, and for what its worth, the doctor told me he thought the women would actually try what they learned in their own homes. And besides, I get the satisfaction of knowing that we’re still doing the best we can, so I’ll take it for what it’s worth.

~E