Obstacles

Written the 19 of February...

The reason I haven’t written in a while is because my computer no longer connects to the internet. I hope I figure out a good way to still get photos up and keep in touch often but my computer is about 2x or 3x faster than computers at cybers so you just may have to wait to see the last 8 months of my service.

WAIST was so much fun this year. I know more people from Senegal and even a few from surrounding countries. I wore my mummy costume and black eye shadow! I was rather upset with our region since not many people dressed up. Some of my favorite Peace Corpses were the Dead Heads who even played the part of hippies with peaceful demonstrations on the field, and Etienne’s Worst Nightmare. Etienne is our Safety and Security Coordinator. They wore t-shirts that said, “went to bed with a cut on my foot and bled to death” and “adopted a cute puppy and died of rabies” and “went to Magal and died of Cholera”, etc. After our first game, I started telling everyone that if our pitcher didn’t find a costume before the next game I would pitch, completely ruining our chances of advancing to playoffs. It was meant to be a threat but in the end I pitched since we were ahead by so much. I’m not very good but only walked a few… we won 3 of our 4 games and then lost our playoff game to another PC Senegal team, who ended up getting third overall. PCV Mauritania Pirates won first place, which is much better than Senegal 1 winning. I mean, honestly, it’s an American sport! The Senegalese can’t win 2 years in a row!

Tuesday we had our All Volunteer Conference. It was a good chance to figure out who is doing what and how to work together more often, especially across sectors. I have still been talking to people about my idea of an Adopt-a-Tree project. I haven’t explained that yet, have I? Well, I have compost, and a fence! We still don’t have money collected from all the families, but that’s because Senegalese holidays are expensive and pretty much the only thing that people spend their money on rather than development projects. Not bitter, I swear…but I still need to go around door-to-door with the Chef de Quartier to get more people on board when it’s not a holiday around here. But my idea for selling the compost to get initial funds from my project is to plant trees in cooperation with the schools. Bambey is spread out along the route nationale but is deeper than it is longer. Kids cut across the “bush” to get to one of the middle schools and the high school. It’s a path cut through the desert with very few thorn trees that is seriously several degrees higher than the rest of town because of the lack of shade.

My idea is to go to the schools, sell one tree and some of our compost to one student or a pair of students. Then all together, we would go and plant these trees along this path together. The students would be responsible for their own fence and I would give prizes to those with the most creative, most effective, etc, as to motivate them. They would then be responsible for their tree to keep it watered and protected from goats until they are tall enough.

But my idea has hit a few road blocks. I went and talked with Eaux et Forets (Water and Forests) which is an organization that is funded to provide exactly what the name implies. I wanted advice on how to go about a tree nursery and he gave me the bad news. People don’t really like Neem trees, the kind I wanted to plant on this path, and that the trees take over a year to out-plant. Other trees can’t tolerate our salty tap water or don’t offer as much shade. So I think what I will do now is go to the middle schools and high school and do a survey on what the kids want and who would be willing to do this tree nursery, maybe for a year, at the school. But this doesn’t exactly sell my compost, which is the initial goal. So back to the drawing board. I am not giving up on this. I still want to plant lots of trees, work with the schools to teach about garbage separation and sell compost but I just need to get through the obstacle course that daily life is here in Senegal.