And you thought these were museum pieces

The rains have arrived!

With the rains comes mass farming time. Every big patch of ground becomes a tiny field of beans or corn. Other patches have these mounds with tubers stuck in them. Those are my personal favorite because they look like alien farms.

Anyway, this is how we prepare the fields for planting. Tie up the cows and donkeys to the simple plow. Amazing how tools and machines I used to only see in museums are now a part of my everyday life.

Pool!

Sometimes we do this...

Just because

This is Coly.

Yea, he's got lots of boogers on his face but he's still darn cute.

Poop!

Seriously.

Poop is a very serious issue to a Peace Corps volunteer. In this post we'll discuss the importance of cow and donkey feces in my life.

This past week I had an amazing guest. She is a study abroad student in Dakar named Cailtlin. She and six other students braved the long journey from Dakar to spend a week in a "real" village here in the Kolda region.

One of the highlights from the week was the most successful women group meetings of all time. I told Caitlin that she didn't need to attend. My part of the meeting usually lasts about 2 minutes and the other 58 are dedicated to the women talking at a loud volume at a rapid speed about the prices of okra. It's always amusing.

The formula of the meetings usually go as such...

Woopa-jey (me, the young woppa) - I start by stating what we need to discuss
Mariama (my savior) - Translates what I just said, in the same language I just said it
Woppa (the Pres.) - Repeats what Mariama says and adds a few ideas of her own, the looks at me and I click in approval.

Then someone mentions something about someone and it's a snowball rolling down the hill. The women start and with each comment gather a little more speed in their speech and volume in their tone. It goes and goes until everyone is trying to speak over eachother all at the same time when Souncan suddenly shouts, "Woppa (me), we're so happy you're here. We're so happy you greet us. We love what you're doing for the village..." and starts clapping. The other women totally do a 180 and repeat her, including the clapping. Part of me loves this HUGE ego boost, the other part feels like a little 5 year old who put their pants on properly for the first time and everyone was relieved I finally figured out how.

Anyway, this particular meeting was not like that.

I arrived with three large rice sacks and started the meeting. "Ok, ladies, here's what I need from you to begin our tree pepineres. I have three sacks here and you have one week to fill them with poop. I need poop from the donkeys and the cows. Do NOT give me sheep or goat poop..."

Mariama chimed in, "Woppa, don't we need to pound it?"

My jaw fell to the ground, "What?!?! You mean you all actually know how to do this? I don't have to teach you?"

Everyone, "Of course we know! give us the sacks!"

And here's where it gets awesome...

My wife, Kabajey (aka the woman I live with who I give an allowance to every Saturday) Jumped up and stated to the group, "I'm gonna get the most poop, I've got that donkey tied up all day over there!"

"No way, I am! My husband has a horse who just had a baby!"

And off they all ran to their compounds and returned with the massive pounder tools and buckets and bags worth of poop and start pounding. The little girls are helping, the little boys are clapping and cheering everyone on.

While all this is going on, I'm standing there, dumbfounded. I didn't have to lift a finger. I turned to Caitlin, "I can't let you leave. You make magic happen here." We laughed and pulled out the cameras.
And here they are, pounding away.

Tree Grafting!

Greetings again everyone! Well, my friend Maggie did it! She put on an amazing teaching session for Kolda Region villagers to come learn about tree grafting and basic tree pepinere techniques.

The formation was held in a village called Keur Bombey (or Cuer, not sure which language it's in) which happens to be the home of a GIANT banana plantation. The plantation is run by a man know as the Banana Baron. Seriously.

The story goes as such, we headed out in two sept-places to Bombey. No one really 100% on where it actually is, me hoping and praying my two villagers made it on their own.

Long story short, no car break downs and we found it. A tractor arrived to take the bunch of happy villagers ready to learn to the actual village.

The afternoon of the first day was spent touring the enormous place and hanging out with everyone.

Day two was the big day. After breakfast we headed over to the school to learn proper pepinere techniques. It was quite fun watching a bunch of dressed up people digging in manure. After that we moved on to tree grafting which is what this image is showing. The woman is the woman I'm named after in my village, Woppa. She's the president of our women's group and neat woman all around.

After our learning sessions we had wonderful lunch prepared by the ladies of the village. Good ol' maffe gerte. Of course, I didn't eat with a spoon. I like to be culturally sensitive, aka, I didn't bring one.
In the end it was a great success. We even had a little certificate ceremony at the end for each of the participants. Let me tell you, they were all really, REALLY happy to get one of those.

Dry Season Gardening

The hot, dry season is here and you know what that means? Gardening!

Down by the farrow (the bog where we harvest rice after the rains) has become dry enough to set up gardens for the next few months. They grow all sorts of things; lettuce, cabbage, bitter tomatoes, regular tomatoes, okra, carrots, onions and more!

Every one in my village has a little plot down in this space. Every morning someone, usually a woman, goes out and waters. This involves dunking a bucket into a big hole and walking the bucket where the plants are. Not the greatest, but it works.

In the early evening everyone, including myself, heads down to water and gather treats for dinner. I don't show up there to "work." I don't water, I don't weed. Some people may call that lazy, but I'm here for other reasons. I come to learn. Just by hanging out with my villagers in their gardens, taking pictures, asking questions and usually getting a few snacks out of it is work enough.

The next step is how to make this space more useful year round. My friend, Demba (in the picture, on the right) Wants to set up permanent wells just outside of the gardens and big cement basins in the gardens to hold water so it would be easier, and in turn, a more effective and productive practice.

We'll see what we can do about that!

The Well!

Alrighty friends, my project is underway.

Here's what's going on: We're building a space for a garden a minute walk from the village. It's going to have a real chain link fence and a well inside so we don't have to do extra walking!

Currently, my villagers have a garden, but it's a good 40 minute walk into the bush and has HORRIBLE bamboo fencing that needs to be replaced every year and is easily trampled by sheep, goats, cows and mbambas...whatever those are.

After this garden space gets up and running I want to start a little garden space near the current well (near my house) for a kids garden. It'll be nice to teach them basic gardening practices and have a space for me (and future volunteers) to grow a few snacks.

So, here's the well so far! More to come!



It's really really exciting.

Baptism

Here's Papa, offering me a cookie.
















Sali's the one in the middle. With all the make up.

Here we go again...

Ok, so if you're reading this you probably have received my mass emails and I'm going to assume you kind of know what's going on.

Here's the deal, I'm really going to try my darndest to keep this blog thing up now. This is going to be geared towards my two teacher friends, Grant and Jared (thanks for enriching America's youth) and the Salina Rotary Club.

I was totally against this idea (blogging) for the first six months but now that I'm settled and actually have projects in the work I'll talk about them here!

This is also a place I can do a better job of displaying photos. I know how annoying it is to get enormous photos in your email, but I'll still send out the ones I consider to be gems.

Boring stuff is over!

On to fun!