A Letter

12 February 2013

I just received a letter written over a year ago.  Postal service is not reliable here.  I never received a much anticipated care package from friends down under.  But this is just talk.  The PC medical office was holding on to this letter.  After a mental health session during Pre-Service Training, anecdotes in the letter date it to October 2012, we were told to write letters to ourselves.  They provided a questionnaire and I recall sitting in the Disco Hut at the Thies Training Center, thinking in earnest about my purpose in joining the PC, my goals for my service.  So far I believe I have made at least one positive change in my community—my host mom is on birth control after having seven children, I introduced improved variety seed and taught farmers techniques for crop maturation and storage, and have three work partners making compost.  These are achievements.  And I don’t think I’ve over-stepped my bounds as a volunteer or as a foreigner.  I’ve had discussions about domestic violence, early marriage, female genital cutting, and family planning with female and male family and friends.  All have been constructive, intelligent conversations with questions about cultural  differences and known information posed by both parties.  And I certainly know more about myself.  I’ve learned I am strong, if I can keep my mind off weaknesses.  I am strong, if I enjoy my work and don’t stop doing.  I like to draw and create and plan.  I like to get dirty working and playing outside with my dog and friends.

31 December 2012: Mom and brother eat home-grown rice for breakfast. Fanta made it into the turro, a delicious peanut-rice porridge.

My coping mechanisms are the same.  I run or do yoga.  I escape into a book or music.  And when I need to, I cry, eat and fall asleep.  Something I didn’t mention in my letter a year ago was that I also talk to friend and family to work out my mental anguish of all sizes and sorts.  That circle of people has grown, as it almost always does, over the year; but the magnitude and strength of its growth has been surprising and joyful this year.  PCVs and Senegalese alike have supplied me with a support structure I imagined I’d be without when I set off to live in a village in the African bush.  Support from home has been unwavering, although volunteers often complain about loved ones in the U.S. not “getting it,” you all have gotten it or at lease well enough to be of tremendous support.  And every member of my immediate family has come to visit to understand better.  I continue to be grateful for the supportive community that sent me over here with love and keeping adding names to the list of thanks.

The questionnaire asked me to remark on something happening in my life at that moment that I’d want to remember, or laugh about.  I was surprised by my answer.  A flirtation was budding then, and now after enjoying 8 months of companionship, enduring bad phone reception for long talks about agriculture and life and then a break up with the person who had become my closest confident in country, I’m glad to know I found amusement in its prospect.

Coincidentally, it was the trying conversations where he and I were moving to be friends that revealed a change in myself as I’d wished to find, according to this letter.  He said he knew I would act according to what I knew was right for me.  This new found confidence in my actions and words was something he took for granted in my personality but is something I know has grown within me.  I have long been stubborn and opinionated, perhaps confident from an outsider’s perspectives, however this feeling of being sure is new.  It is not studied, but a resultant of studying more deeply myself and my interests, which are flourishing into an array of things I had hardly considered previously—West African languages, subsistence agriculture, and landscape architecture.

I mention several times in my letter a desire to know what is next for me.  My friend, Sharon noted the other day that on our first life chat in my hut circa December 2012, I had shoulder-length curly hair and was contemplating using my MCAT scores for good and applying to medical school, and now I’ve cut my hair so short it’d be impossible to guess it curls and I want to design gardens for a living.  I have figured somethings out—this does not preclude growing my hair out.  The only thing left to decide at the moment is to extend my work here for another year—give Senegal a little more time to work its tough love on me and to help new PCVs flourish by assisting in their training—or to go home, embrace the creature comforts of the developed world and get on with my dream to get Americans thinking about their need for subsistence agriculture and what it means in our country.  It’s a toss up at the moment.  Surely, if I read this a year from now my queries will have changed and I can find comfort in knowing there will always be a concern to resolve and a friend to make.  For now I will do as I told myself to and “take a deep breath” knowing that with change there will be consistency and in observing the change I will discover more truths about myself and the world.

Love,

MaryCad.

Feed The Future

Obama’s global food security initiative is called “Feed the Future.”  Senegal is one of the participating countries and Peace Corps is one of the recipients of funding through our food security initiative.  Pretty much all of my work is directly related to food security, but none more than this:  I planted a field of rice.

As agriculture extension agents, PCVs extend improved variety field crops developed by ISRA (L’Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles).  This is a way for us to get seed with better pest resistance, shorter maturation periods, fuller grains, etc. into our communities and to develop relationships with farmers so that we can extend improved farming techniques as well.  I wasn’t expecting to use any of the seed myself, but when I returned to site after a short trip to the regional capitol one time I was told I had a field.  This was after six months of refusing.  ”No, no, I’ll be helping you with your fields.  I can’t have my own” was apparently translates to “I want work my own rice field, because I am a woman in this community and that’s what women do when the rains come.”  My only response at this point could be “Okay, but don’t think for a second I’m not going to try to teach you something with this field.”  Thus was born my SRI (System of Rice Intensification) demonstration.

SRI is an improved method of rice farming originally developed for irrigated fields, but easily adaptable to seasonal flood planes like the faroo (seasonal river) in F.B.  Below is a photo essay of how my first farming season went.

 

The most Senegalese coffee I will ever make. Traditionally, a woman would stay home to make breakfast to bring out to a dawn work crew helping prepare her field. I let them come later for milky sweet coffee and bread, as long as I got to teach them a thing or two.

All in good humor: the women of Fode Bayo know how to find joy in even the most strenuous labor.

Now that we’ve visualized the spacing with rope, let’s throw a dance party and sing a song. Yes, that’s where the joy comes from.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16 July 2012: NERICA (New RICe for Africa) ready to be seeded in neat 25x25cm spacing.

27 July 2012: Thinning to one plant per space. What a perfect transplant, energy pack included.

A little plot of order amongst broad-casted rice for miles around.

30 July 2012: Scarecrow installed. Or should I say Scareweaver. Weaver birds love to suck the juice out of growing rice. Another method employed is stringing cassette tape around the field.

Check out that tillering! I counted thirty-two tillers on my largest plant. The average for most rice fields in Fode Bayo was three.

25 September 2012: Muddy prints after weeding #3. I went a little over-board on the weeding so that it looked perfect for a community field visit led by my boss, Famara Massaly, who came all the way from Dakar to talk with us about the state of our agricultural production.

8 October 2012: Water logged. Now that’s how I’d imagined rice fields before I’d come to Senegal.

16 October 2012: Looks like a field of food to me. My plot was located on a frequently passed path through the faroo. Women and men alike complimented me on how nice my rice looked and showed interest in my growing method.

14 November 2012: Harvested. A sickle is an incredible tool. I was able to cut off the tops of the plants and let them keep producing. Got two good rounds of harvest.

0.5kg sown and 11.6kg harvested. More than twice the rate of production by the community members fields I monitored through the seed extension program. Thanks to Fanta I was able to get it all home too.

Doing my part. And feeling hopeful that next year more women in my village will bringing yields like mine with a new knowledge about the effects of spacing, thinning, and timely weeding.

What would I do without Fanta? 30 December 2012: She, Konkou, and Bintou pound my rice while I show my American family around village.

31 December 2012: Mom and brother eat home-grown rice for breakfast. Fanta made it into the turro, a delicious peanut-rice porridge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feeding myself in the future, that’s something, right?

Bon Appetit!

MaryCad.

Not A Crisis: Existensionalism

16 October 2012

The following are reflections on what a year in country has done to the inner workings of Fatoumata Chetdo (that means Mandinka, in Pulaar) and Fatoumata Fulo (that means a Pulaar from the Fuladou, our region of Senegal).  Fatou and Fatou is a comedy duo my friend Whitney and I have created to entertain ourselves and our fellow travelers as we suffer through Senegalese public transportation.

FC: So I was sitting in Sharon’s compound and realized there was no way this was the same world or time that I had lived in the rest of my life.

FF: As I biked through the heavily wooded forest I came upon what I thought was a herd of goats and turned out to be a pack of baboons.  As I slowed, in some fear, I thought how does this same place exist with my home in South Dakota.

FF/FC: God made this all.  He is watching the baboons and the cows grazing clover in America.

FC: Sitting with my best friend at site and the child she named after me, feeling closer to them than anything else and thinking nothing else exists outside this room.

FF: The bush is deep and full, full of trees and an abundance of life.

FC: I am not white.

FF: It is normal and natural to physically exert myself for necessities.  Walking 10 kilometers to a road, pulling water from a 10-meter deep well.

FC: The stars at night are endless and magnificent and by some miracle I am not going to fall off the ground into them.

FF: If the diversity of this world is so great, what could be out there on other planets?

FF/FC: In any one space of green there are a 1000 shades of green.

FC: Not everything exists for a reason.  Some plants serve no purpose to us but thrive anyway.  The plants we value for food are only valuable by chance of having a large enough seed or sweet enough fruit.

FF: Our villages have evolved over generations but also remained the same.

FC: Our villages knew we existed before we knew they existed, before we ever came to Senegal.

Real time conclusion (7 Jan. 2013, only a little later): I think what it comes down to is that after a year in Senegal somethings are unfathomable and somethings are much easier to fathom than we ever thought they’d be.  My friends, PCVs like Whitney and Senegals work partners and neighbors, have mostly made all the fathoming fun.  And if you’re not going to spend time in the woods having philosophical thoughts while you’re in the Peace Corps, when else are you going to do it?  Promise I haven’t gone too far off the deep end, though.  My parents and brother were just here to confirm that and hopefully we’ll get their report up here on the blog soon.

Oh, and at the peak of our insanity we shaved our heads.  What a perfect time to find out the true shape of our heads?

The moment I lost it all.

Fatou & Fatou: Mid-head shaving we did the half-shaved look for a day.

Love and Deep Thoughts,

MaryCad.

Ntooma–A Bird Pooped on Fanta

Mary and her parents, Daba Kondjira and Fanta Kante on Tabaski.

9 October 2012

We were sitting on the bamboo bed at Fanta’s house catching each other up on the day’s events.  Due to the size of her stomach, she stayed at home most of the day, only taking one short walk to the faroo to check on her rice; nevertheless she’d gathered more news from the village than I had.  It’s tempting to blame this on my language barrier, but I honestly think it’s a mother’s charm that allows one to know all without lifting a finger.  Fanta is the mother of seven, so I imagine her senses are even more heightened than my flesh and blood mother.  Anyway, we were sitting there chatting and a bird pooped on Fanta.  I don’t know the Mandinka word for luck, so I told her good things were coming.

The next day, September 25^th, dusk was well upon me as I raced the daylight home carrying seven kilos of beans on my baggage rack, a reward for a long day’s work on the Master Farm.  I nearly sped past Daba, Fanta’s husband on the path outside the Health Hug.  I assumed he was strolling back from an evening shift of scaring monkeys away from his fields and started shouting a greeting when something in his face made me slow down.  He wasn’t strolling.  He was pacing.  “Fanta is in there,” he nearly whispered as he tends to through the cigarette parting his lips.

I leaned my bike against the fence and hurried up to the porch.  Three older women from Fanta’s compound were sitting there waiting.  They said they hadn’t been there long and after a few silent moments passed I decided to race off to bathe.  For once no one begged my attention or greetings when I said I was hurrying back to the Health Hug.  Those who did not already know Fanta was there understood with a glance towards my anxious, excited eyes and uncertain grin.

I took a book and my raincoat to ensure I would not need them.  And I didn’t, because it turns out sitting anxiously is a very busying occupation.  The other women pleaded with Fanta to give forgiveness as she cried in waves and rhythms, praying and singing in pain.  Ansata, the educated and sassy midwife, who by some miracle comes from a Pulaar village one and a half compounds strong, was inside snapping off commands like it was no big deal to produce a child from between your legs with nothing but cries to Allah to relieve the pain.  I was silent, sitting up straight, ears and eyes wide.  Finally there was a tiny whine,  less wholesome than Fanta’s, full of urgency, not desperation.  After Ansata chopped some more orders, Fanta called for Diara, my host mother, to come to the door.  When told she had left, Fanta requested that someone go get me.  “I’m here,” I called out in a chorus of “she’s here’s.”

We sat and watched Ansata come and go with requests for water and Fanta’s clothes, a bed pan of amniotic sac, and the new clothe for swaddling.  It wasn’t long until we were invited in to see mother and child.  Someone else had taken my flashlight and I had to call the small herd of women in front of me back to the first room we entered to see the child, who had just been born, before crowding her mother.

That’s right, her, a gorgeous baby girl, 4.8 kilograms with sweet, soft curls of black hair, scrunched-up puppy eyes and little hands whiter than my own.  We carried the baby into the second room where Fanta was prostrate, every fiber of her being yanked and pulled, tired to extremes.  Of course she managed to scoot over for me to sit, never forgetting propriety.  The baby was passed around pushy ladies telling her she was ugly and telling me they were going to beat her.  They were all calling her my namesake but I was the last in the room to hold her.  When I did the room finally went still and quiet.  She hadn’t been alive five minutes, and here I was holding her, my namesake, ntooma.

Mary hears her name for the first time at her naambo, naming ceremony.

A week later little Mary was christened.  The name was whispered from ear to ear around her head so that she might not forget.  The beautiful locks shaved from her head and a piece of Fanta’s were tied away in a cloth to be blessed and sewn into burro, medicine, to protect Mary on a string around her neck.  The day before her christening.  Mary’s father asked me what her name was going to be—mine, my mother’s, any name I want to lie an say was mine to give myself a chuckle every time I saw her.  The position of namesake here is one similar to god-parent but with the addendum that if I wanted to or if her mother every asked me, I could be responsible for this child as my own.

Loosing her soft newborn curls at the christening.

A small portion of Fanta’s hair is shaved off too. The hair of the mother and child are saved to make a grigri or burro, tradition Senegalese sufi muslim medicine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I visit her every day and am questioned on my whereabouts if I don’t make it around until evening.  My feeling are those of a responsible parent.  Of course she is perfect and the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen.  I already worry about her future, how I will keep in touch with her and if it’s be possible or appropriate to fund her education.  I love her to bits and cherish the moments I can quell her tears with a round of “Hush Little Baby” sung at a level audible only to her tiny ears as we sway about the goats and weaver’s nest dropped for the mango trees.  She cures and sadness or tiredness I accumulate throughout the day.  Needless to say, I believe in the luck.

Love from,

M.Cad and M.Kondjira

Mary and Mary on Tabaski

Sunkaro

26 August 2012

The month of fasting, Sunkaro (suŋ= to fast, karo=month) or Ramadan has come and past.  We waited for one new moon, ate six times that day, combining our daily routine with the new schedule of break-fast.  We went hungry and learned how to work through and beyond hunger.  This is what my brother tells me Allah commanded the fast for, learning to persevere when things are scarce.  His explanation was that Africans need to make their bodies strong through fasting.  Others told me when they felt hunger it made them think of Allah and this was good.  And, they said, they’d think of their duty to those who have less, to those they’d give alms to when the harvests come in.

My Korite flower arrangement. Wildflowers sourced on my morning run. You can take the girl out of Virginia, but you can’t take the garden club out of the girl.

Now I don’t want to sound righteous.  I put in my effort, but I was not fully committed.  At first, I refused to fast.  I’m not a Muslim, it’s not my haaj (way or business).  I worked through the afternooning helping a farmer weed his corn.  In my bucket bath I poured extra water on my face and let it linger on my lips.  Then I sat at my doorstep, litre of water in hand, awaiting not my perception of sunset but when the elders around me raised their cups to drink.  For break-fast we eat things, which are usually never present, bread and hot sweet drinks—café, comprised mostly of powdered milk, “tea” a drink from The Gambia whose contents took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out, and kinkliba, my favorite, a yummy leaf dried and made as a tea.  It always tasted great but never as good as at the end of my first fast day.

After gulping down the initial break-fast and as much water as their stomachs could handle, everyone would run off for fourth prayer.  On their return we’d drink, not eat, a millet porridge we consume with kalamaas, big ladle-like spoons traditionally made from gourds (mine is purple plastic).  Then I’d wait often with my youngest siblings crowding around to read my book with me while everyone else went to mosque.  This prayer they said lasted longer because they’d stand and sit thirteen times instead of the usual seven.  I’d try to distract the littlest ones from missing their Moms and one day found myself in desperation singing camps songs to them.  Those who know my singing voice won’t be surprised that the kids just looked confused while I was going at it and would commence crying with the pauses between songs.  Mostly this was nice, reflective family time, but I’d often be ready to sleep before dinner was served.

When the first day past without too much bother I decided fasting was some what better than opening my stomach for the petit lunches that are served to those not fasting (the children, the pregnant, breast feeding and sickly) and getting the taste for hunger.  My decision was to fast when I was in village, but not when I was out.  With a Sustainable Agriculture sector summit in Tamba and a couple day trips from site, I fasted ten days.  Some days I drank water, some I didn’t.  On three days I snuck mid-morning tea or a spoonful of peanut butter, so we’ll count seven days as true fasts, decent work for an Episcopalian.  And it did make me feel worthy of chicken for breakfast and four bowls of ceebon Korite, the holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan.

My brother, Mama, and the first of my chickens to be sacrificed for human consumption.

And this is Seyni chowing down on that very chicken (for breakfast!).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Five days earlier was the more interesting holiday, Kitimoo.  The last Wednesday of Ramadan everyone breaks into age groups (apparently, I fit with the young brides, 15-18 years old, some only promised off, some recently wed) and go around to each compound singing.  The most prominent song screeches “lye lye de lye.”  This and other songs are shouted in high-pitched voices until the person you’re visiting gives you money.  When the money came there was a jumble of blessings and usually a market-like interaction for change—only small coins are expected and when someone wants to give less than the coins they have, they ask for change.  Each group ends caroling at the mosque, where I left them.  It  was already midnight, but everyone else stayed up until five A.M. lye-lyeing.

Fanta, Mama, Khadijatou, Binta, and Fatou dancing around village, so excited for the feast day.

The prayer place.

Ahminta and Banya, two of the women I stood with just outside the prayer, greeting everyone on their way home.

For Korite, everyone gathers in a big clearing outside to pray in the morning and the rest is mostly about eating and not working.  I’d say Kitimoo is to midnight mass as Korite is to Christmas.  But a fête it was indeed and I’m glad to be back on a regular schedule.  Few events in my life have forced me to change routine and reflect the way Ramadan did and I believe my friends and family here are stronger for it.

“Scolding locks…a leader in quality hair car roducts.” I was sold and how else was I going to get my hair in braids.

Fanta and I in our holiday complets. Note: braids and white scalp.

The aftermath of my hair. Crimped is always in vogue right?

Love, M.Cad. who will be in dire need of fashion advice upon her return to the U.S.

It’s Raining Rain. Alleluia!

9 July 2012

I have a small, two-sided chalk board in my hut, where I keep all my “to-dos.”  On one side I have the “long-term to-dos,” including “build a live-roof on my chicken coop,” make compost”—the ideals for when I have time and the always necessary tasks.  Flip it over and you’ll find a list just as long entitled “to do when rains come.”  Well, my friends, the rain has come, and so has my sister so the past few weeks have been a whirlwind.

After the first rain storm I headed out to check on our earthworks demo at first light. A boomerang berm in Fanta’s farro, doing it’s job, holding water and collecting organic matter.

After returning to site, almost healed from my cashew oil encounter, I had a tight ship to run.  My crew consisted of 10 local farmers and Gano, 4km away in Thiewol Lao.  Some unseen stroke of charm or maybe my ability to speak English had my new site mate, Steph, wrapped-up in much of this too.  We’ll call her my skipper, following my poor directions from her village to mine and taking in the copious instructions I left for my brief trip to Dakar, where I would source Julia, Lexa, and a surprise Aussie, Danushka.

At first it was all hands on deck, my first mates Seyni and Fanta darted with me from starboard to port, fiving orders and gathering assurances that the PC-extended ISRA (Institut Sénégalaise de Recherches Agricoles) field crops would be seeded at proper spacing using mechanical and hand seeding.  I made meter sticks for each farmer and taped the recommended spacing to each bottle of seed, so they could match the numbers on the bottle to the numbers on stick.  Seyni and Fanta took turns meeting with farmers to explain this plan, drawing rows of corn or sorghum in the sand and to reinforce my desire to know everything about how this seed grows.  Peace Corps requires volunteers to record, seeding, weeding, thinning dates, observe flowering, tillering and ultimately determine yields at season’s close.

Along with checking in with each farmer on basic maintenance, a few farmers are helping me perform demonstrations for improved techniques.  Some of these won’t start until thinning or flowering for spacing and pest management.  Two started in this crazy week.  One farmer dug Zai holes, amended, moisture-retaining planting holes for his corn with help from Seyni, Steph, and I.  This guy was prepared with neem leaves (for pest repellent and Nitrogen given by green organic matter), manure (even more Nitrogen and whatever the animal source has been eating), and wood ash (Carbon source and provider of crystal-like ant-killers) as I advised him.  We knocked out four rows of sixteen Zai holes in with pleasant conversation and breaks for breakfast and water brought by his wife.  The next day I found myself in a very different situation with the farmer interested in creating amended ditches for his sorghum crop.  I reminded Farmer #1 once of the necessary materials.  Farmer #2, I reminded three times and nothing was ready when Seyni and I arrived at 7:30 to work.  It was hot by the time we were digging eleven 10-meter long trenches and there was only enough material to amend one trench.  He said he and his sons would finish them the next day but a week and a half later nothing had changed.  Starting this work with individual farmers is a lesson that one must cast a far net to catch both the motivated worker and discover those just hanging on the gills of larger fish to get ahead.

Work break. Seyni, Mahamadou, and Bacardi sitting behind the check dam in Mama’s peanut field.

My namesake wading through water in the seasonal river. Note the entirely hand-hoed fields. These women know how to work. Just a little too fast for implementing earthworks (until next year, inshallah).

I was also advancing the big projects you’ve all heard about already, Earthworks and the Master Farm.  When Seyni, Fanta, and I returned from the Earthworks training, fourteen women and one man signed up to begin water harvesting projects in their fields.  All the women’s work was in the rice fields, which are seeded after the other crops, so we started with my brother, Mama, and his peanut field.  We did not have a lot of workers on hand so we discussed the potential for contour berms throughout the field and built one check dam where a large swatch of water pours on to the field and has previously carried his seed across the path along the opposite border.  Real-time update: Although Seyni and Fanta said they would help organize work days as soon as the women started working the rice fields, when I got home the fields were all prepared without implementing any of the technologies.  I am less sure about teaching community leadership than I am about teaching agricultural technologies, but helping my counterparts become confident enough to lead and extend knowledge to their community I’ve decided is more valuable than me spouting information myself.

The Master Farm field, plowed on contour! These are the things that excite Ag Volunteers.

Sunset ride home. I could not tell you how many times I’ve biked the path between Fode Bayo and Thiewol Lao, but it’s getting prettier and prettier with every rain.  

In the Master Farm we prepared garden beds for rainy season vegetables, seeded leucena trees on contour berms in the field crop space.  We tried day after day  to prepare the field crop demos but we were stopped by rain and the final revelation that Gano did not have the proper piece to attach the new ripper, a conservation farming tool, to his plow.  He had withheld this information possibly for simplicity in our confusing, mixed-lingual conversations or desire to please in the impractical way I’ve come to associate with the Senegalese perception of truth telling.  Just because they want to do it, doesn’t mean they are doing it.  This left Gano, Steph, and I waiting out a rain storm in the newly roofed shed at the Master Farm, reviewing the steps for each demonstration.  We each had paper and pen, where we drew out how the ripper would follow the contour lines established by the berms, digging a narrow trench in which amendments would be added and on which crops would be seeded.  It was as thorough as I could be with the forces of Senegal not allowing us to work the field together.  Being dependent on the weather the way one must be here induces anxiety in us Westerners with our plans.  My sister was coming, the date of her flight would not change if heavy rains pushed back field work.  The rains had come, I’d checked off what I could from my list, but worlds were colliding.  It was obvious that my plans and Senegal’s surprises would clash when I calculated that Julia’s flight from Washington Dulles to Leopold Senghor was a shorter trip than my journey from Fodé Bayo to Dakar.

May God bring us good harvests,

M.Cad.

My Master Farm

13 June 2012

Double digging a garden bed with Gano at the Master Farm in my first month at site.

Proud of his companion planted cabbage and salad, not necessarily biologically advantages, but a good pairing for market production.

As I recline under the shade of Amadou Gano’s (or simply Gano, as his name has been famed among regional PCVs) mango orchard waiting for Peace Corps staff to come install drip irrigation, my work with the Master Farm program is in perfect focus.  Despite the slight distraction of the allergic reaction I’m having to cashew oil and the full-torso heat rash that are plaguing my skin, my mind is as clear as it can be on a day that necessitates it to switch between four languages (English for higher thought processes, Mandinka at home, the minimal gardening and greeting Pulaar that gets me by in my work at the Master Farm, and French for the school garden lessons I’m translating).  The Master Farmer program is a PC/Senegal initiative supported by USAID’s Food Security Fund.  The goal is to have 100 one-acre farms owned and operated by Senegalese farmers in communities with or near a PCV, where agricultural demonstrations can serve as an educational tool and provide income for the farmer.

(one month later)

Red, rashed, and swollen. The aftermath of cracking cashews in village.

So, it turns out the entire rash was an allergic reaction to cashew oil that had overrun the minor heat rash I had prior to cracking open not fully burnt cashews seeds.  I couldn’t ben my arms fully they were so swollen.  As a friend saw the swelling decrease over the course of the turning point day, she remarked, “I can see some muscle definition in your arm again!”  My arms got the worst of it, but the rash spanned my entire body.  It was not pretty and my village was concerned.  This had not happened to either of the previous volunteer in F.B.  Everyone wanted it to go away and they were full of advice:  Only shower with cold water, don’t sleep witha sheet on, let me carry you to the hospital to get medicine.  In the end, a lot of loratadine and two days at the PC Regional house in Kolda with a computer and electric fan to distract me from itching, it went away and all returned to normal.

And normal, at this point in time, was going to the Master Farm every other day.  Typically, PCVs are supposed to work with their Master Farmer (MF) two to three times per week, but preparing for rainy season had me there more often than usual.  Getting the MF to be more independent is a challenging goal for me and several other volunteers.  There’s a fine line we walk between letting the MF be in charge of his own farm and figure out how he can apply PC’s techniques alone and making sure all the demonstrations are implemented correctly.  We want to please our bosses (PC Staff) but we also want this program to be sustainable.  USAID has only signed on for the first four years of the program, so MFs need their fields to be productive enough to continue working at the established pace when funding is gone.

As volunteers, we are also very aware that we are only here for two years and communities are only supposed to host three volunteers (for a total of six years).  Other PCVs will come, NGOs will come, but we want our villages and work partners to be able to stand on their own two feet.  This is both the goal of development work and the sticking point for development.  Since Senegal has been a stable nation, relative to its neighbors, for so long, it has never lost aid money.  Development organizations see Senegal as a safe investment, and thus it has become a dependent nation.  And suddenly becoming a development agent, what do I do to ease the dependency?  This is a constant nagging in my work, especially in a village with incredible motivation and work ethic.  What can I do to wean Senegal off aid?

My female counterpart, Fanta, helping out at the Master Farm. Later that week she taught a double digging demonstration for the Fode Bayo women’s garden.

Gano teaching proper spacing at the garden training.

Step 1:  Only apply for grants that go towards trainings.  See “Earthworks!” and here, what I like about the Master Farm program: Helping Gano become a local agricultural trainer.  Master Farm budgets, written each year specifically for each site by the PCVs working there, typically cover a garden training and a field day event at the farm.  We hosted a two-day garden training this March, attended by forty local women, where Gano’s enthusiasm and understanding of basic and improved organic gardening principles gave him a chance to shine as a teacher.  Inshallah, we will have a field day this Fall open to the surrounding communities, where Gano and PC Staff will present our field crop demonstrations.  Gano is also great at on-the-fly trainings.  Often when people wander into the garden to steal some shade a mango, chat, or stare at the toubabs at work, he will give them a lesson on soil amendments and double digging.

Step 2: Tell people and help them realize what they can accomplish on their own and with local resources.  This is where I try to give Gano instructions for work to finish between my visits or let him roll with a new idea for companion planting.  Also, as a group, the MFs have decided they will get bank accounts before the end of this year.  As PCVs, all we have left to do is tell them how progressive and important their decision is.

Gano and another Master Farmer reuniting during the Earthworks Training.

Gano, Youssepha (PC Tech Assistant), and another Master Farmer visiting for the garden training.

Step 3: Introduce only appropriate technologies and practices.  If anything is too difficult to do or obtain in the unassisted circumstances of my village, it’s not worth doing.  There is likely a simpler, more appropriate solution that can be found through living and working in the same circumstances.  This is where I (and other PCVs) have bumped heads with PC staff.  The drip irrigation system installed at all MFs, for example, PC staff believes is an appropriate technology to model for increased agricultural production.  Yes, irrigation is helpful, some books I’ve read recently claim it is basis for societal evolution and success.  The materials for the system installed, however, cost 240,000 cfa, are only available in Dakar, and require training to install properly.  All replacement parts are also only available in Dakar.  The minimum transit cost to Dakar is 6,000 cfa, plus baggage fees.  New flip flops cost 500 cfa and kids in my village often go barefoot for weeks before their parents  are able to afford a new pair, whether this is poor financial planning or lack of work and resources doesn’t matter because the money is not available for local farmers to apply this system.  What this demonstrates to local farmers is not an improved practice, but reinforces the power of foreign aid.  And perhaps we could create a local system using hoses, faucets and joints available at least in regional capitols and bigger cities.  I don’t want to say that PC staff is too far removed from the village to realize this, because they are Senegalese, which I am not (spoiler!) and they have dedicated their entire working lives to studying and working with agriculture in Senegal; however I’ve not talk to one volunteer who thinks this specific technology is appropriate for their community.

PC tech assistant, Arfang, Gano, and some little helpers working on the drip irrigation installation.

My new neighbor, Steph, and Gano using the Stand & Plant (http://www.standnplant.com/) seeder made of PVC piping and a few metal connectors.

The seeder in action, planting a rice intensification demonstration.

What it comes down to is a balance of giving and teaching.  A balance that I think a program like the Master Farms can obtain, if we watch how much money we are throwing at individuals versus training those individuals to be community resources.  Training of trainers, as its called in development work.  Getting natural innovators to find success with improved access to information and sharing their education with others and creating more innovators and more ideas.  That’s what I hope the Master Farm program will be, a seed of an idea that grows and grows through generations  into a piece of the Senegal developed by Senegalese.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Oh, and did I tell you that Gano has the cutest children ever. Little Souleman and Ami eating breakfast on the farm.