Agroforestry practices

Occasionally, we do what our original paperwork sent from Washington D.C. said we would do.  Agroforestry Extension Agents.  We did some land, plant, tree work in our rainy season garden, we grew a tree called Moringa.  This tree has some great characteristics including vitamins, nitrogen fixing, worm extraction, and water purification.  To read more about this ‘miracle tree’ you can go to our friends Josh and Kelsy’s blog: http://joshuakelseypeacecorps.blogspot.com/2011/07/moringa-training.html.  Josh is extremely ‘in the know’ when it comes to Moringa, and even facilitated a Moringa planting trek across the country.  That’s what good volunteers do in their spare time, organize treks.  Ben and I….don’t organize treks.  They are in the group that is about to go back home and the rest of us are all sad because we’ll miss them!!! Don’t leave guys; party’s just getting interesting ;)!

Back to the tree, it is actually interesting and when we were in Senegal traveling to Cape Verde, we met a volunteer who is trying to link growers with an American businessman who bottles the leaves and sells them as vitamin supplements in health food stores.  Not sure if that legitimizes this ‘miracle tree’ claim for you, but I’m always happy to try things for free that other people spend lots of money on.  We also heard that this process was easy and could help with villagers’ nutrition problems, and that the NGO concern universal would pay money for the pounded, dried leaves.  So we planted, harvested, dried, and pounded it and now are putting 1-2 scoops in our rice meals for nutritional supplements.  We have discussed this process with our family and villagers to try and do the same.  Luis, our Spaniard in village, and our youth association are also interested in growing Moringa as well.  So far, the process was simple, easy to do, and has kept us healthy these past couple of weeks.  We’ve given out small amounts to some people in the village and they appreciate it and we’ve found that most people do know about the tree and call it ‘boro’, mandinka for medicine.  Hopefully, they will follow our example of growing it and eating it themselves.  If nothing else it is a good reminder.

We also helped prepare the local mosquito repellant called ‘Neem Cream’ with our Youth Association.  It turned out better than expected with the organization recouping the costs of the materials within a few days of making the cream.  The villagers like it too and ask us about it frequently.  Our biggest problem was finding containers to put the cream in!

Moringa leaves heading to the drying mat

Rice drying in the fields

Kanali Festivities

The Gambian President, His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya Jammeh, threw the Peace Corps a party for its 50^th anniversary in the president’s village of Kanali.  One thing is for certain about the night, that party will be a party we won’t forget for awhile.  H.E. Yaya Jammeh has built a nice hotel, safari park, and venue out near his village of origin, about an hour and half drive (if you are in military escort going 100 mph) away from the city. Per somewhat usual Gambian protocol, the event was re-scheduled once and no one had a clue as to the specific details of the party.  The specific details being things like time, accommodations, vehicles, food…you know, minor details like that.  The day of the party all the volunteers, staff, and US Embassy staff met at the Peace Corps office and were picked up by nice government owned buses and escorted by military entourage out to Kanali.  We were received by the villagers with drumming and dancing and sat in a long line of cars to enter the hotel.  Once inside, we were served a very good lunch and were walked over to the large venue where the actual program itself took place.  The villagers were invited to attend the program and there was a band playing Gambian music.  The actual venue reminded me a lot of something you would see at the Renaissance festival or Medieval times because the bleachers were all color coded, there was a huge open field of grass, and there was a section for VIPs – which we sat in – that was directly behind where the president sat on his large sofa.  The program consisted of speeches given by the Ambassador, Country Director, volunteers in local languages, and a skit performed by us volunteers who went to Camp GAGA.  I had a small part in the skit but I did manage to make the president laugh fairly hard with my impersonation of an old village woman.  My line was ‘Toubabo, Sumolu lee?’ which directly translates to ‘White person, how are the home people?’.

Later in the program, Surprise! - The president whipped out some large suitcases and gave all the volunteers and staff gifts.  The ladies received some stewardess-like pastel business suits while the guys received West African fashioned garments.  The program was concluded with H.E. Jammeh giving a speech and the band playing.  By this time it was around midnight and we walked over to the hotel area and watched a short film a volunteer had made in the Gambia and ate a delicious dinner around 1 am!  Definitely one of the best meals so far in the Gambia, even if it was at 1 am.  Then we were bussed over to our lodging for the night, which was a nice open style tiled hotel that included a mattress on the floor with no sheets, towels, mats or soap.  We got about 3 ½ hours of sleep and then woke up for breakfast.  After breakfast we piled into our Peace Corps transport and began the entourage home.  We had the entourage drop us off on the junction to our village, which as you can imagine was quite a scene for the village of Bessi located on the road.  To see 2 busses and about 10 Peace Corps cars all stop at the junction, let us off and watch us wave good-bye to the 70 or so toubabs! And then, we walked the 7-8k back to our village, ending the weekend’s festivities for us. 

Another note about the party, I decided I did not own anything appropriate enough to meet H.E. Jammeh so I asked Sibou if I could borrow a complet from her and she happily lent me a very nice hot pink outfit.  The end result being that I looked like a cross between a gypsy and a giant pink flamingo all day and night.  Luckily, I was not alone in my ridiculousness – Asoebe J !!

Kanali is not too shabby

Ya we look good!

Asoebe!!

Skit performing

Ben meeting H.E. Yaya Jammeh

Brian, Mike, and Ben with their gifts of huge African robes!

Abby, me, Shawn, and Alex!

Pictures

I tried to take pictures of kids playing with some things sent from America. Thanks for the care packages, we do very much appreciate it and I think the kids do too! The rest of the pictures are just random pictures of our villagers. 

Binta, Al San, Fatou J playing with 3d Chalk!

Simba and his new friend walter the baby goat

Neighbors

Serah

Girls braiding

The small gang of children that terrorizes the village. Boxes, plastic bags, tires - the usual toys.

Health Survey

I recently completed a women’s health survey of 15 women in my village with a counterpart for a returned peace corps volunteer who is now getting his masters at (of all places) University of Texas.  I trained Jeneba, the counterpart, to take a random survey sample of our women to analyze the correlation between women’s education levels and children’s health. 

The survey was about 25 questions ranging from age, births, deaths, and questions about education.  It was very interesting and the women were all very happy to help out.  I handed out soap at the end of the survey and other women were very eager to do the survey with us after they realized they would get free soap.  I compiled a few averages of the survey to see what they were just for our benefit and curiosity:  The average age of a woman in our village is around 35.  The average amount of children each woman has is 5 kids.  The age range that women had their first child is from 15 to 20.  5 of the 15 women surveyed have used a form of birth control – which very much surprised me.  The lowest amount of people living in one compound was 6, while the largest amount of people was 34.  12 women had delivered their children in a hospital at least once, and three had never delivered in a hospital.  One woman, Kuy, proudly told me that she delivered all her children in her home, with NO help!

Life in the Bush

Living out in the bush can be hard with limited access to resources, but right now it’s beautiful and when we aren’t doing other things, we go out to the farms.  I will go out to the bush with Sibou and our neighbor JahKaddy to pick some greens, they call kucha, and we’ll go pick ripe lemons, okra, and peppers out of the overgrown garden.  I enjoy doing that but it was nothing compared to going out to the farms these past weeks after the rice and coos had finally seeded. Oh my friends, these farms are a beautiful sight to see and a wonderful place to work.  The first time I went out to the farms after the crops had seeded, I took my camera once and everybody I saw was so happy to see me come out – it’s about a 40 minute walk from the village.  They were so proud of their crops that will be ready to harvest within the month.  Several people took me around their farms and asked me to take pictures of their crops, and I gladly obliged to document proof of their toil, skill, strength and pride of their work.

Currently, the main tasks are to sit in these locally made structures called ‘bantaba’s’ and scare away birds and monkeys.  A lot of old women and children participate in this task of live scarecrows, which also makes going out to the farms fun.  One old lady had a big old bowl she was drumming on when we came by.  She was great, drumming and dancing around while yelling at birds.   

Small boys taking their families lunch out to the farms

Nacas Colley in his Bantaba watching for monkeys

Rice fields

Host mom Isotou in our rice fields that we will be enjoying soon!

Small boy using sling shot to scare away birds

The entrance to our village

Mamou Badgie's coos fields

The End is Near

The end of the rainy season is quickly approaching.  We are eagerly anticipating the end of October because its hot and come November, Winter!  No snow is in the forecast yet however.  The past 2 weeks have been the hottest here with no rain to cool us off.  Being that it is 90 degrees plus inside our hut at night now, we have started sleeping in our tent outside.  Best decision ever.  We are both sleeping a lot better in our tent, in our backyard.  Besides bracing the heat, we are still working on the same projects that I wrote about last month.

 I have started teaching some environmental education lessons at the school and am collecting materials for a resource center the new head master is starting.  The women have started clearing the grass from the dry season garden and are preparing to start gardening again after they harvest the rice.  This time, the Spanish NGO, the Future is Our Country is bringing in a man from the city who works with a different NGO called Concern Universal to help the women plan their garden.  I will be helping out with that as well, and the Future is Our Country has asked me to write a report on how everything goes.  Our youth association group is still going well; we’ve weeded the compound, and started making the fence.  Later we will finish the fence, clean the house, and harvest the group’s rice.  We selected 4 youth members to attend a work shop at the NGO Bee Cause to learn how to make items using honey such as soap, lotion, candles, and food with honey.  We hope to get the honey from the Spanish NGO and also sell the items at Luis’s restaurant in the city. 

Women's Kafoo at the rice fields

Our host grandma - Mama Musa

My Adoring Fans,

This is what is commonly known across the United States as a “Ben Blog”.  Kate has diligently been keeping everyone updated on whats been going on with us here in The Gambia.  I will just give you an update on a few various things.  First of all, things here are HOT! I know you people in Texas have been dealing with some heat yourself.  Now imagine that for weeks at a time you had no available Air Conditioned room to retreat to and no cold beverages.  Kate handles it a little better than me.  The result for me has been some weird skin things and a complete lack of energy throughout the day.  We are right at the end of hot season so hopefully things will be cooling off very soon.  Many people told us that October was the worst month for the heat and, at least in my opinion, that has proven true.  The last few months have been quite hot but rain storms would help to cool things off a bit.  The rain trails off in October so we went for almost two weeks with no rain.  The result was hot and humid.  We’re now in the city for a few days, where we can find air conditioned refuge in some places and I am hoping when we head back out to village we’ll start to experience some of that cool air that people say is on the way.

Work wise, things are going slow in some areas and picking up in others.  We have a youth association forming in our village that we are working with and that’s going well.  The head of the organization is our friend Ebrima.  The group is quite motivated and we are starting various village development and income generating projects.  My work with our village lodge seems to be stalled by the universal staller of politics!  Nope, its not just an American problem.  The detail isn’t important but the project isn’t really moving forward.  With tourist season coming on very soon I don’t know what will happen.  I’ve made a number of people aware that it is not my job to push a project people aren’t going to do so I guess they will either get things together (and I will help them) or they wont (and I will find other stuff to do).  Right now, my biggest success has been…you guessed it…a women’s tie- dye group, however they call it tie and dye.  We now have 32 women.  We collect money from the group and I went shopping with the head of the group this morning for the necessary materials to dye a bunch of fabric, which we will hope to sell very quickly so we can repeat the process.  The project pretty much started when I helped two women who already know how to do tie and dye sit down and figure out exactly how much profit they made from the last job they did.  They don’t generally do any profit analysis, mostly because they can’t.  They just do it, get some money and go on their way.  We were pretty easily able to say, hey you made x amount of Delasi from this job.  After that they talked to me about wanting to start a group (groups here are known as “Kafoos”).  So now we have our tie and dye Kafoo of a little over 30 women, we pooled our money, we have the materials and they are going to dye them in a few days and we will work to sell them.  I think with some focus, only limited input from me on the record keeping and a little marketing we can get some cash coming in.  Not to mention I get to fulfill my life dream of making tie-dye products.  You’ll find our stuff on a street corner in Austin soon enough!

I have something else to share with you all - something that some might find disturbing, something that some might find interesting, something that some might not care about at all.  You might assume that something bad has happened. Depending on whose point of view you take you might say this event was bad.  For instance, from the point of view of the monkey it was bad.  It was bad to be shot and then eaten.  From the point of view of those of us who ate the lil’ guy it wasn’t bad.  It tasted like eating goat, which is good.  If you haven’t figured it out yet – we ate monkey.  It wasn’t a monkey head sliced open so we could eat the brains, Indiana Jones style, or anything crazy.  It was prepared regular Gambia style and had a pretty normal flavor.  Kate went out to the fields with some women and learned when a monkey head was shown to her that they killed a monkey attacking the crops that day and cooked it.  She called me and I quickly made my way out where we had a few bites.  As one person told us, monkeys love to eat the crops but they don’t actually do any farming themselves.  These days, many people spend their days in the field chasing of monkeys, baboons and birds.  A lot of people have dogs to help and I guess this particular monkey decided to stay and fight with a dog so the owner of the farm proceeded to shoot it.  So don’t think of it as eating a cute little monkey at the zoo that knows how to wave at everyone or Marcel from Friends, think of it as killing and then eating a wild hog that was attacking your farm in America.  Point is, we ate a monkey.

Well,  I guess that’s enough for this Ben Blog.  Women’s work and monkey eating.  That’s whats up here in Africa. Fo naato, Ben