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
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