Friday, September 23, 2011

Some photos

My Cucumbers, so big!

My Cucumbers plants growing dutifully up my hut!!!

My Okra!! Used in almost every sauce here, my family loves me for growing this.

One of many big Neem trees in my village and some kids helping me find them all.

USAID camp, the kids loved me, of course.

I have so many things growing, this is only half of them!

Agave Sisal is in one of the beds here, and the polypots are filled with Cashews.

The polypots are Cashew trees and there is a watermelon plant snaking its way around them.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Cha-cha-cha-cha-changes!

Turn and face the strange! Don't wanna be a richer man! Cha-cha-cha changes! Gonna have-ta be a different man! Time may change me, but I can't trace time!  -David Bowie

I feel exceptionally scatterbrained today, so I apologize in advance for the extremely poor writing below. Plans are running smoothly in village. The rainy season is running along and the village is covered in corn. You used to be able to see what someone was doing three family compounds away, but now corn stalks are blocking your view in every direction. The corn is almost ripe and that's going to be amazing. People roast it over charcoal. I'll be keeping enough margarine and salt on hand for that day.

I've officially requested a Case des Tout Petits (CTP) be installed in my village. This is the Senegalese version of a kindergarten. If the request is filled our village of 1000 people (including 115 kids of CTP age, 3-5) will have a center of learning for the little naked kids that run around my village all day and play with garbage or eat dirt. My school director told me if they approve the CTP there would be a big part and he would dance, he also said everyone in the village would dance including my host father the village chief. We will see!

I now have 150 new tree sacks in my backyard. Thirty of them are a thorny species which will eventually be used to make live fencing for the school garden and health hut gardens. A hundred of the sacks are cashew trees. The rest are a mix of pretty interesting species, orange trees, desert date trees, grapefruit trees, etc.

Live fencing is a fence made of trees or shrubs. I have 20 Agave Sisal plants in one nursery bed in my backyard for such a fence. They are cactus-like shrubs that grow a meter or 1.5m tall. I also have a bunch of thorny trees; these can be planted at very close proximity so they become like prison bars or a bit farther apart but their branches weaved together so they grow into a wall. Trimmed correctly they can be impenetrable! Take that goats, sheep and cows!

My school director and I will be drawing a plan soon for all these trees. I've also been exploring the prospect of collecting and exporting a natural resource that goes untapped in every village here in Senegal, the Neem seed. Neem trees are wonder-trees that are everywhere and ever-ignored. After cold-calling many different people in the neem industry (neem soap manufacturers, R&D labs testing neem, neem pesticide manufacturers, neem advocates) I've found one person that is motivated to work with me in setting up a business exporting raw neem seed to India. We've been speaking quite a bit, and perhaps when March-April-May rolls around (the harvest time for neem seed) I, my villagers, and the villages around mine will be collecting seed, bagging it up and putting it all on a truck to Dakar, where it will be exported to India. I'm still collecting data to see if this is a feasible plan, but so far it looks pretty solid.

After I teach villagers all around me how to correctly dry the seed they will go ahead and harvest, dry and bag it themselves. I will give them a certain amount of money per bag depending on total costs. Neem seed can be priced anywhere from $.01 to $1 per kilo. Each tree gives 30-100kg of seed. Dried correctly thats 20-70kg of dried seed per tree. 50kg sacks will most likely be used. One 50kg sack will most likely weigh out light, like 25kg. So each sack filled to the brim will represent one or two trees, and could potentially snatch $25 on the global market. Depending on all transportation costs, villagers stand to make at least $5-10 per sack, which would be pretty good supplementary income for a country with an annual per-capita income of $1000.

This business will be established by myself and specific counterparts. If successful, these counterparts will then take the reins and run the business themselves.

I've also been looking into grad schools and I think I know what I want to study. As an undergrad I studied human rights, international law and relations, and Criminology, which is an amalgamation of sociological, anthropological and psychological studies relating to crime theory and criminal justice systems and policy. As a graduate I'd like to study criminal justice policy and perhaps eventually work at a criminal justice policy research and advocacy organization. Drug policy, prison policy and many other criminal justice policies intrigue me, and I know of many think tanks/research organizations that I would love to work with. If I try this path and realize it's not for me I'll bail, we'll see.

I'm actively looking for things to do here in Senegal in relation to crime policy. Domestic violence, forced marriage and FGM are all illegal here, and each carry specific definitions and punishments, but I'm not sure the people here know exactly what protection their laws entitle them to. These three crimes happen all the time in little and big villages, road towns and cities. Very soon I will be attending a volunteer summit on Gender and Development in Dakar. There I plan on speaking to other volunteers and putting together a tourney, or village-to-village tour, to address these issues and make people aware of the protection their own laws provide them.

I could just keep typing but I'm going to stop now, as I'm sure many of you have stopped reading this post already because of it's poor quality and scatter-brained rambling. Later!

Love you,
Costa

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Second Story

When I arrived at my "volunteer site" of Niandouba, the village I'd be spending my two year service in, I was a little nervous. It wasn't as scary as the first ten minutes of the training site, but a bunch of emotions and worries welled up. I sat in my new hut and thought, "Well, I'm here for two years, I guess I'll take a nap?" Two years, two years, two years, what to do today? A strange thought. I had been expecting this, we all were, because during our three months of training my cohort was told again and again about all the worries that volunteers have. I usually disregarded them. I often told myself I'm not going to listen to these people and expect whatever happens to them will happen to me.

Well, there was one thing that we were constantly warned about. Older volunteers kept telling us: you will be worrying about how much work you do, and you will be telling yourself "I spoke to my neighbor today, that's my work for today! Lets go read a book!" They spoke as if this was inevitable, and cynic/relativist/whatever that I am I couldn't believe that. Everyone always sees things differently and nothing is certainly going to happen to me if it happened to ten before me. Well, I'll be different, and they are wrong I said to myself. To prove them wrong I jammed my first five weeks in village with tasks.

My first five weeks in Niandouba I walked around the village getting to know the people and their environment. I asked lots of questions, figured out what the people think they need and figured out ways to meet those needs sustainably. Week one I planted my garden and showed my family what techniques I used to enrich the soil. Week two I spoke to our elementary school director, a very intelligent and witty man. After many minutes of struggling to communicate with him in Pulaar we shook hands, then he looked me in the eyes and said in English "Teaching... is very difficult work." Week three I showed people how to create polypots, or plastic tree sacks.

Week four I decided I would teach people how to make Neem lotion. Neem leaves and seeds have many chemicals in them, and one of them is a very potent pesticide. Steeping leaves in boiling water for five minutes releases enough to mix with oil and shaved soap to make anti-bug lotion. I began the demonstration and what happened next was one of the things we were constantly warned would happen. I told everyone that was watching the demonstration that they could take some and put it on their bodies. They interpreted this as you can take some home with you. Kids and people started bringing containers and asking for the lotion. Then they started shoving each other, then the women started yelling at each other. Then one of my mothers took the remainder of the lotion and marched home yelling at everyone else while they yelled at her. It was a disaster.

I got upset and started walking home. Should have told them that the lotion was only for my family. Should have told them that if they wanted lotion, all they had to do was buy soap and oil and come find me....

I walked through a neighbor's house and a girl was there. I had met her before, briefly. She was on the back of the area doctor's motorcycle, and the doctor introduced her to me as a nurse. She looked about my age and she said she spoke a little English but was very quiet. Currently, I was fuming and confused. I wanted to go yell at my mother who embarrassed me by taking the bucket of lotion and running home. I looked at her as I walked past and she said to me in the most perfect English I had heard out of a Senegalese person:

Girl: Where is my mosquito lotion?
Me: You too? If you wanted lotion you should have come to the demonstration.
Girl: Well I didn't want to.
Me: Okay, well then you don't get any lotion. I did the demonstration to teach people how to make the lotion, not give it away.
Girl: Well you should have saved some for me.

At this point I was even more mad. It intrigued me that she spoke so well but it was infuriating that she would ask me for lotion, totally disregarding the fact that she didn't even get off her ass to come see how it was made.

Me (very mad and not making much sense): I don't understand! You want me to save you some lotion after showing people how to make it? What would you do with it? Use it once then never make it, and instead ask me if you can have some whenever you think you needed some? Do you see what is wrong with that? Why are all these people going crazy over this lotion, they just want a little, you just want a little, but you don't want to make it. You'll never ask me to help you make it because you won't buy the 200CFA (40 cents) worth of soap and oil.
Girl: Well, I didn't go to your demonstration because I'm not part of this village. And I didn't want to be around so many people. People would talk about me and I didn't want any problems. And people are going crazy over your lotion because people around them are dying of malaria. They think that this thing you are making will save their families lives.

At this point all of my cares and worries were blown out of my body. I wasn't angry at all anymore. This girl was not from my village, and for that matter she was not Senegalese either. Her name is Aminata and came from The Gambia, visiting her uncle. She was worried about what people thought, just like me! She was worried, just like me!   And she rationally explained to me why people were freaking out so much and getting violent. I sat down with her and we spoke for hours, long into the night.

She ended up spending an extra week in Niandouba and we hung out a lot. She would tell me her perceptions of Senegalese and West Africans and I would laugh and wonder if she was right or wrong in her observations. But there was one thing we totally agreed on: Helping people is hard. It's difficult for behavior change to be implemented, especially by a foreigner but even on one's self.

And it is hard. Volunteer life is as easy as your mind makes it. You can wake up at 11am, read books and play in your garden until 4, eat lunch, take a nap, read more, eat dinner and then fall asleep. And you could be happy doing this, but you may feel incredibly guilty. And rightly so, you have a job to do, right? The trick is to make sure you are doing your job meeting that first goal of the Peace CorpsHelping the people of your host country to meet their need for trained men and women.

But it is hard, and I was happy that Aminata showed me that people here know it and that we share the same problems: they worry a lot, they can be socially anxious, and they understand that helping people and trying to ignite behavior change is difficult. And like Aminata told me when she left Niandouba for The Gambia, "Just stay calm, don't get angry at these people, and don't worry, your job is as hard as it is kind."