Project Update: Dental Bamtaare Tooro Demo Garden Underway!

Beds of okra with and without mulch

 It’s been a long time since I have written any thing lately, mainly because I have been so busy and also because I took a short wonderful vacation to Greece a couple months ago, but now is the time to rectify this. What have I been so busy with? The past two months I have dedicated a large portion of my time to officially starting the Dental Bamtaare TooroDemontration Garden that I have mention a couple times before.

In the past few weeks, me and my work partners have cleared the gardening space and double-dug and amended 22 gardening beds. We have planted a vegetable nursery with bitter tomato, tomato, egg plant, hot pepper, and lettuce and directly seeded cucumber, watermelon, okra, turnips, and mint. We also have a small section of the live fence installed (a fence make of closely spaced thorny trees to keep out animals).

What I am most excited about is the moringa bed that we planted and have already been able to harvest! Moringa is an extremely nutritious tree that produces leaves that can be eaten raw or made in to a powder as an additive to the normal food eaten here. It is drought tolerant and does well in even in this arid climate. The first thing people notice about the garden is the beautiful, lush moringa as it’s the greenest thing probably in my whole village. Right now, my moringa is hanging up to dry before I teach my work partners how to make the powder. You all should really look up this tree.

Moringa bed before harvest

Drying the moringa

Moringa bed after harvest

Turnips with and without compost 

Anyways, because the purpose of the garden is to demonstrate improved gardening techniques, the garden is designed in a way to clearly show side-by-side comparisons of a specific technique. For example, in the mulching demonstration, there are two beds of okra right next to each other, one that is mulched with grasses and weeds in order to keep in moisture and one that is not. It is clear from looking as the two beds side-by-side that the mulched bed retains more water  and thus has to be watered less frequently than the non-mulched bed. All of the beds in the garden are designed in this fashion to give examples of various techniques including double-digging and compost, spacing, staking certain vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes, etc.

When Ramadan (the Islamic month of fasting) is over and the garden is looking pretty nice, we will have a large training where all of the presidents of the women’s gardens in Dental’s 29 partner villages will come to the garden and learn techniques to take back to their village. After the training, I will visit each garden to see which techniques the women have adopted and which techniques they have not in order to gauge how the successful the training is as well as what techniques are both feasible and culturally appropriate for time-constrained women.  

Cute baby because no post should be without

Volunteer Visit

Sorry this post is a long one, but there was so much to say about my not one, but three sites I will be working at! If you don’t care to read the details of the cities I’ll be working in and the projects, you can feel free to skip down to the highlights of the trip.

This past week I spent visiting my future permanent site of Taredji. My and my fellow stagemates Raphael and Erin who are also going to the North stayed with a group of volunteers who live in Ndioum, a pretty large town on the Rue National (the main highway throughout Senegal).  We got to see our sites and learn more about the communities we will be living in and the projects we might be working on. My situation is unique among volunteers—I will be living and working in Taredji as well as overseeing projects in Ndioum and Podor.

Let’s start with Podor. Podor is a city of around 12,000 people right on the boarder between Senegal and Mauritania (the two countries are divided by the Senegal River). It is a very historic city and was once occupied by the French and even has a 17^th century fort. The city also gets a small amount of tourism (I saw one French family on vacation with their two children while I was there). A volunteer who is COSing (Close of Service) used to be located in Podor but had to move to Ndioum during the middle of his service. He made a beautiful hospital garden in Podor, which is now mildly run down. I will be taking over this garden and hopefully reinvigorating my work partners there to keep with the project.

                                                                        The fort in Podor

                                                                    Podor Hospital Garden

 Looking out from Podor over the Senegal River and Mauritania 

Lounging on the side of the Senegal River 

Next stop, Ndioum! Ndioum is a regional capital for Peace Corps Senegal. This means there is a regional house there where volunteers in the North can stay from time to time. Also, three volunteers who used to live in Podor now live in Ndioum. It is a fairly large city but somewhat smaller and less organized than Podor. Ndioum is about 40 kilometers from Podor and on the Rue National. Ndioum had a very nice hospital that is currently the largest hospital in the Department of Podor (soon to be usurped by Pate). The director of the hospital is very excited to start a hospital garden there, and the project has already been approved by Peace Corps. Once I install at my permanent site, I will assist the other volunteers in Ndioum to build the garden which will help to cut food costs for patients.

Finally Taredji, where I will actually be living (inshallah, because a home for me there is yet to be found).Taredji is a road town at the junction of the Rue National and the road that takes you to Podor, thus it receives heavy traffic and essentially grew out of its prime location.  Taredji has about 5,000-6,000 people split into two areas of the town. There are two potential projects I am really excited for in Taredji. One is a school garden at a primary school. The director of the primary school is so excited about the garden that he has already fenced off an area at the school. Right across the street is a local CBO that does a wide variety of things including women’s rights, democracy, and trainings of various kinds that I am still learning about. Here, the organization wants to set up a demonstration site to teach farming techniques and best practices to the surrounding villages that the organization already has connections with. This is essentially what my whole job is as an Urban Ag volunteer, so I am really excited to have such a motivated organization to work with. 

Future site of the demo garden in Taredji

Highlights of VV

•       Lounging by the Senegal River and looking out to Mauritania
•     Almost driving into the Senegal River on the way back to the training center
•     Eating hamburgers and cake at the regional house
•     Meeting my awesome counterpart at the CBO who wants to name me after her
•     Climbing to the roof of the old French fort in Podor
•     Sleeping on the roof every night in Ndioum
•     Being woken up to the terrified crying of a baby goat stuck in the yard
•     Being woken up by the sounds of the mosque and Justin Beiber, simultaneously