Human Rescue Plan

Fight World Hunger

Friday, April 24, 2009

A semi-massive update

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take a way.
-Antoine de Saint Exupery Wind, Sand, and Stars


And on that note, I ditch the thought of trying to catch up the last few months of journal. Here's a summary of what's been going on:

Garden Project: The gardens looked great. The gardeners put in a lot of money (they have to buy water from the well women) and effort and we had a good crop of vegetables. Unfortunately, the rest of them couldn't seem to keep their hands off of the veggies. Every time a cabbage or tomato or carrot was ripe and ready to harvest, it was gone the next day. I suspect children, but the gardeners say it's probably the adults, too. With the garden being so close to the well, and thus so far from the town, it can't be policed efficiently. The gardeners were very disappointed. We're going to try again once World Vision finishes working on our pump, which is closer to the village and thus we can have people guard it effectively. Apparently the same thing happened over ten years ago when an NGO came through and tried to start a school garden - all the veggies disappeared. It's really frustrating to see peoples' hard work be destroyed so casually. My mai gari and host family assure me that if they find the people they'll take them to the sarki in Chadakori and have them fined/punished. It is, to me, so ridiculous that they would steal from the garden - they KNEW it was a trial garden - I told them that if it went really well I'd start trying to get a big garden project funded. Now, they get nothing. Frustrating.

Tree Nursery: Hopefully better fated than the garden, whose space we're now using. I'm hoping that the larger number of people participating will increase the psychological buy in and thus reduce the thefts. Plus, black plastic bags with trees are a bit bigger than tomatoes, and thus harder to conceal theft. The set up is as follows: for 250F they get 15 black plastic bags and seeds of kuka (baobab) or zogala (moringa). A lot of them are also going to use bedi (neem) or dan tahoua (Acacia colei) seeds which they can get in the village from trees we already have. I've invested the initial 6000 to get the project off the ground. Once that's paid back any further profit will go towards upkeep of the fund and the tree nursery area. The villagers can see a profit of 1250F, minus whatever they pay for water, which should be much less than for the garden as the trees are smaller and don't require as much water as vegetables. Trees sell for 100F in my village market and they're a rarity - hard to bring from Maradi. The seller when he had them always seemed to sell out. Also, the nearby bigger market doesn't have a tree seller - they definitely have a market to sell the trees. Personally, I'm hoping they'll keep at least a few of the trees to plant in their fields and around their houses. Any tree around here is a good thing - they reduce the wind and runoff. But even if they're used as purely profit, profit is something my village could use. So, yay. Here's hoping.

Pump: World Vision came out and put in the pipes for our new pump. The water was approximately 75 meters down, the well itself I believe goes to 100m. Just a bit deep, yes? Getting the work done was a lot of fun to watch - they made holes for the drilling mud and spent several days drilling and getting the piping in. Now we're waiting for them to do tests on the water and come back and put in the hand pump. That's been a couple of months, but they've put the one in at the village up the road, so I suspect we should see ours before I COS, which is good.

Womens' Groups: The two womens' groups I've helped start have taken off. I checked in with both of them recently. The one in the nearby hamlet has about 50 women and they're borrowing and paying back almost the entire fund every week. I'm really impressed. The one in my town is going a bit more slowly - the pay in is half as much as the hamlet, and because it's larger, around 100 women, there are more squabbles over who gets what when. But, they're both going and people are using them to pay for bikis or to make food to sell at market. It's really neat that they're continuing all by themselves. Plus, it's a great source of change for when the bank gives me ridiculously large bills - I try to explain that I live in the bush, and sometimes they get that I can't do anything with a 5000F bill (~$10) in a village where 100F is a lot of money.

Hadjia House: I finally got my ridiculously expensive shade hangar installed this past week before coming in for team meeting. It's tall and lovely and there will be no more evil termites and stuff falling on my head and leaking water and. It's great! Next step - cementing the floor so it'll be even for me to sleep on - I hate my cot and I sleep on the floor on mattresses on a mat. I've also got all the fabric on the ceiling so no more mud/termite dirt falling on me, and I don't have to look at the spiders I know are up there. Yay. My garden died before producing anything of use - hot season came really early this year, and much stronger than it did last year. I should have planted it before I went on vacation in December, but oh well, hindsight 20/20 and all that. It's now serving as a place for my own personal tree nursery of acacias for my field this coming rainy season. I have a. tolurosa and a. colei from SIM, a great NGO that I like a lot. They work sustainably for ag development. At the moment the tree nursery people really wanted bedi with a smattering of the others - I'm hoping that when they see how awesome the acacias are they'll want to plant them for the next round. They provide firewood and windbreaks and nutritious seed and they fix nitrogen. Yay.

Life in general: Pretty good. I think I've figured out what I want to do after service. I'm interested in looking into the effects that current agricultural policies in the developed world (i.e. US/EU Farm Policy) have on the agricultural sector (i.e. over 75% of the people) in the developing world. I'd like to focus on the Sahelian area, but not really sure yet. Who knows? Maybe I'll end up studying underwater basket weaving. or extend service to go teach in China. Anything could happen. We could be Cylons.

:)
M


P.S. Current book read count since 22 January = 31 If anyone reads Pride and Predjudice and Zombies, could you send it? It looks VERY fun.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Quickie

So just updated the Dragons in Niger blog, if anyone's interested.
:)
M