Water harvesting + heat exhaustion = Awesomeness

The whole group in Fodé Bayo, the third site on the tour

     Last Friday, my cousin Samba, my neighbor Coumba and I, set out to meet four other volunteers and their counterparts in a village about 3 hours away. After months of planning and kicking this particular project idea around, five of us decided that we were going to do a series of five water-harvesting and soil erosion training demonstrations, one in each of our sites, and include our local counterparts on the tour. The idea was that, by all of us visiting each individual site, we would have a better idea of what kind of work each other is doing, the individual challenges and strengths the belong to each site, and the variety of water harvesting  methods that might be applicable in one particular village vs another. So off we went...

 As wonderfully and conscientiously trained as we all are, there are times when the work that we do depends on the expertise of another volunteer or a Peace Corps training guru - in this case, third-year volunteer Austin and PC staff member Youssupha. This training tour would never have happened without their help - Austin leading the training in English (he's Wolof, which is almost useless in Pulaar-country), and then being translated into Pulaar by Youssupha. Also, we would have all melted without the women who dedicated themselves to providing us with constant access to drinking water - it's the hottest part of the hot season in Kolda right now, which means that it's averaging about 115-120 in the afternoons and doesn't cool down much during the rest of the day. Not necessarily ideal conditions for a week-long field-training and work in the field with a pickaxe all day, but vital in terms of the upcoming rainy season. Everyone in village is prepping their fields for planting about a month from now, so this was the perfect time to go out and install contour berms, water catchment basins, etc.

The demo terrace - compost will be added during the rainy season

The first village on the tourney was a medium-sized village of about 1000 people on the far-eastern side of the Kolda region. We were hosted by Ruth (red shirt), who is one of the new sustainable agriculture volunteers that arrived this past fall. This was one of the slower-paced and more tiring trainings out of the entire tour, simply because of the amount of explanation that had to go into teaching unfamiliar techniques to seven counterparts and the various villagers who showed up to help/watch. After building contour berms and catchment basins all morning, taking a break during the afternoon, and then finishing work during the late afternoon/evening, we spent the following day traveling back from Timindallah to my site, Nghoki, which is more in the central part of the Kolda region. And it was incredible. All of our counterparts had picked up the techniques from the day before and were ready to run with it the next day. Whereas Ruth's work was all being done in a field, we were working in my community garden site, which is on a slope leading out from my village. Due to the topography of my site, which was very different from Ruth's site the day before, we ended up doing a combination of catchment basins, terraces, and boomerang berms to slow the flow of water down the hill that our community garden is being built on. It was great, though. About 20 of the women from my village's women's group showed up to help, and our counterparts jumped in and did most of training and demonstrations over the course of the day. We knocked out the terraces, boomerang berm, and catchment basins before lunch, and were able to travel to Mary's site in Fodé Bayo that afternoon. The exciting part about the whole demo was the fact that the village could get an idea of how quickly the work can get done if you have enough people working on it, especially in groups.

 

Next up, Fodé Bayo, which is Mary's Mandinka village about 20k north of my site - we crammed all 13 of us into the back of the Peace Corps car and onward we went. Unlike Ruth and I, who are both the first volunteers in our villages, Mary is the third volunteer at her site, so her village was primed and ready to get some serious work done. And once again, the counterparts jumped in and took the lead, determining the contour of the land with homemade A-frames, demonstrating the new techniques, and explaining the entire process to anyone who showed up to help. Her village also has a lot of energy, far more than the other sites we visited - the women started a dance line along the tops of the contour berms to pack down the soil, which went on until we finally broke for lunch and headed on to the next site, Sinchian Sirin. 

Soil erosion in Sinchian Sirin - the whole village is washing out

As it turned out, Sinchian Sirin was the village that most desperately in need of the work that we were trying to do. It's a fairly new village, only founded about 15 years ago, but they have managed to create a canyon running straight through the center of the village by cutting down all of the trees around the village to make room for their cows and field crops. This mass deforestation has resulted in a huge washout every rainy season, causing massive erosion that will force them to move their village in a few years if they don't do something to fix it immediately.

The final stop on the tour was in the city of Kolda itself, where we met with an urban agriculture volunteer, Jordan, to install spillways in the rice paddies that were built in her urban garden site. The problem with that particular site was that they built the garden in an area that is typically flooded to about knee-height every rainy season due to a drainage pipe that empties into a dip in the landscape. Without the spillways, the rice paddies will overflow and the garden beds will be completely submerged.

Whitney & her counterpart, Abdoulaye

But the best night of the tour was the thank you dinner. We decided that we would throw a soiree for our counterparts, so Ruth and I made a world-fusion dinner of guacamole, salsa, salad, vegetable sauce and pasta, and frozen yogurt with chopped mangoes and bananas, and finished it off with banana bread and snickerdoodles. Given the kind of food (rice or millet with peanut sauce, usually) that we all eat all the time, our buffet line was a little too confusing for our counterparts. But in the end, it was a huge success, polished off with a thank you ceremony, photo shoot, and a slideshow to highlight some key moments from the tour itself.

We're already planning to adapt this model to other types of trainings, and hope to start a community garden training tour based along similar lines in July, working primarily on alley cropping, permagardening, live fencing, and the chance to check up on the work that we did during this tour and do some minor repair work once the rains have started. In the end, this tour turned into an incredible experience that, not only resulted in getting a large amount of serious work done that we might not otherwise have been able to do, but sent us back to our sites all with a lot of positive feedback, great energy, and some wonderful moments. I can't wait to start planning the next one...

Youssupha explaining the next steps for maintaining the boomerang berms - also, Mary, Seini, Samba, & Abdoulaye

Me, Samba, Abdoulaye, Youssupha, and various village helper-outers working on the terraces in my village

Mary and the ladies from my garden group, digging along an erosion channel to install the catchment basins.

My counterpart, Samba, leveling-up the dirt along the top of the terrace. Accompanied by my dog, George Michael.

Mary's village and her counterparts, Seini and Fanta

Austin and Ruth - Peace Corps Gothic

Starting the catchment basins at Ruth's site