Kende Ne Waongo

Mom and I are now in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. It's AMAZING. So incredibly green. And friendly. And my phone works, so I'm happy. Volunteers are super helpful here and we've found some great places to stay. The ride here was a bit nuts - they played music videos at volumes well beyond the threshold of pain teh entire trip (starting before 6am) ]
Just a quick update
Hi all
M

Maradi Bound

Greetings all
For those of you with my number I'm in Maradi for a while - feel free to call or email or... I should get it. Our valiant RR, Rakia, had to head home for a bit, so I'm sub-RRing. So far, so good, despite crazy politics, power outages, and just general Niger-ness. I'm using the time wisely - reading trashy novels, watching movies, and trying to sort out life after peace corps. I figure 6 months should be enough time to get something organized. As it is, I'm totally idea-less. Tempted to buck responsibility some more and try WWOOFing around the world - they have sites in Slovenia!! (I miss real soil)

So, just a heads up, more as it happens
M

Life on Planet Earth...

... because I haven't figured out how to get to Vulcan yet.

Yup, you guessed it. I've been spending time obsessing about Star Trek, primarily because I can't even watch the trailers out here - the connection's too slow. So, instead, I drive myself insane with J.J. Abrams' edit of WIRED, which is AMAZING. I love it. Plus, I get to try to explain puzzles to my villagers. I think they get it; they may just smile and nod and write it off as another example of Malika being a bit nuts. Still, gotta love hidden puzzles!

Life in the village continues...

IT'S PLANTING TIME!!! We planted once, and that was fun. I'm trying to promote an agroforestry approach, using acacias from SIM. Unfortunately, despite the fact that we're now well into rainy season, we haven't had enough rain and our first planting died. This is, obviously, not a good thing, as it's already hunger season, meaning food is scarce/expensive, and that replanted seed we can't eat. Also, the delayed planting means a delayed harvest. Not good.

MURALS: Well, finished two now, the anti-conjunctivitis one first and lately a nutrition mural (yes, I realize that step 1 is getting enough to eat, but I want them to start thinking that tuwo (millet/sorghum grain mush) isn't enough from a vitamin/mineral/protein standpoint. So I now have a care-bear baby on my wall.

THE PUMP: Well, there's been some progress on the organizational side - Barkatou and I went to a (horrendously boring repetitious) World Vision training on how a pump committee should be organized. I need to add the caveat that to us it was boring, for the villagers it was a good thing. Being raised as a Western person, you're inculcated with a sense of how business should be run - roles of committee members aren't things that take days to delineate, they just 'are'. **sigh** So, while each member of each committee from each village stood up and explained, almost verbatim, the duties of their particular role, we played dots after listening to it the first time 'round. Still, it's encouraging that they've gotten them organized. Of course, I still have a big blue plastic borehole and no pump...

GARDENING: I, too, have had to replant. I don't know what's going on, but suspect ants, caterpillars, and bunnies! (j/k. Zara will get it if she reads this, the rest of you go watch Buffy) are undermining my attempts to secure a pretty green garden. Drat them all. The moringas are doing very well, though. I regularly enjoy bush florentine crepes - just sautee the leaves with onions, garlic, and add some laughing cow. I also add bouillon to the crepe batter because I've lived here too long.

WOMEN'S GROUP: Well, now that Sa'a, my women's leader, is now the leader of a group of groups in different villages, she's rarely there, and possible thoughts of teaching bread baking and mango jamming but there's still hope to get it done before I leave. Also, they now say they want a new grinding machine; apparently the 2 we already have are not enough and they want to start making peanut butter and other goodies. Fair enough, and yay, really, but this is something that should have been brought up ages ago, so I could maybe get it done before I left, NOT during the beginning of rainy season when no one has money and no one can build anything because it's rainy and they're all out in the fields anyhow... Poor timing, but I'm working the numbers up for the next vol if they choose to do it. Or, who knows, if the job situation doesn't look any better by the time September rolls around, maybe I'll stay and do it. Could be fun :)

Hadjia House: The gutters are up, the water flows into the barrel, all is right with the world. Just in time for Ghanima to have her kittens (she looks like a balloon, any day now).

Life is good. We ARE Cylons. Star Trek needs to be on DVD now. That is all.

Future???

So, greetings all
I've been in town for about a week, what I call my vacation from the village though I'm actually running around a lot here like a headless chicken. Huzaah for work! It's hot season, so, beyond my murals, there's not a lot of work going on in the village at the moment; it's just too darn hot. At the moment I'm enjoying the Guest House's lovely A/C and higherspeed internet. Trying to figure out the rest of my life - no pressure. Torn between loving ag and wanting something that will give me psychological payback faster than the decade it can take to produce a good seed line, which will then take another decade to get to the people who need it most, at which point it's no longer relevant... and yes, I'm prone to hyperbole. So, breeding plants and living abroad that way, or ag econ, which is less hands on and concrete, but instead gives you real numbers you can actually get your hands on... Decisions. So no bloody idea. What I'd really like to do is run away to Slovenia or somewhere in that area, down into the old Ottoman empire, as far south as Turkey, get a rambling old house, renovate it and turn it into a production center - gardens, fruit trees, etc. Of course, though, I'd have highspeed internet and all the modern amenities installed so that I could do outstanding analysis by contract. Yes, I've been reading Under the Tuscan Sun, Blackberry Wine and others. A woman can dream, yah? Fresh fruit, fresh air, WATER, GREEN. Just a few requirements. **sigh** Of course, I want to work on African issues... For all that I'd rather live in Slovenia they don't seem to have any problems with ag (I still remember that deliciously dark soil every time I look at the fields around here...) So, retirement only. I'm 27. Why the heck am I thinking about retirement??! Granted, a few grey hairs here and there...

What I've liked most about living here in Niger is not, surprisingly, the weather (jk) but the opportunity to farm and get my hands dirty. I like my gardens, my tree nursery, and planning my field (I'm going for an agroforestry/regeneration of really crappy marginal farmland approach. I'm planning on planting rows of acacias (nitrogen fixing, fast growing, good firewood and nutritious seeds) 10m apart, with 2 rows of zogala (VERY nutritious leaves) in between those, and planting the ground around with cowpeas. I'm doing this, insha'allah, in two new fields - my old field is too close to the site of the new pump, where they're planning on expanding the village eventually, so there's no real point in planting field trees there. I'm hoping that the next volunteer will continue to take care of the little plots in my host family's fields, so that people can get the idea and expand and eventually reclaim this crappy marginal soil. That's the plan. Of course, said plan requires rain for it to work... It has rained once... we're still in hot season. I'd hold my breath but that might make me sweat even more. Ick.

Hugs from Niger to anyone still reading this ramble.

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.

Quickie

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

Evil Red Lectroids from Planet X by way of the Eighth Dimension

This makes me happy:



Although, really, it needs an oscillation overthruster to be 'interesting'.
Duh.