Yes what have I been doing, the question I am sure gives you all sleepless nights, and for this I am truly sorry. I can only hope that this latest update makes up for the appalling deficit of Ryan that you are all experiencing.
Well with the end of the school year starting to creep up my secondary projects are starting to take form and a lot of my time. For those of you who don't know because for the life of me I can't remember if I've already explained this. Volunteers are given their primary assignment such as Education for me or possibly Health, Economic development, Agriculture, etc. After this primary assignment the volunteer is allowed to branch out into whatever sector they want for their secondary projects depending on the needs and interests of their community. These projects typically don't start right away because it takes time to get to know your community, meet people, discuss their take on their needs and then start proposing ideas to them to see what they would be interested in doing because it will be them who have to continue the project after I have finished my service. Also as I have mentioned before I have taken a strong interest in food security since arriving here and that has been strongly due to both my interest in general health as well as the relative food insecurity found in my village. We are small, 14 km from the nearest body of water, and 65 km from the nearest paved road so there isn't a rapid exchange of goods between us and larger cities and the poorer farmers survive mostly on what they were able to grow during the rainy season from June to October. In addition to this nutrition practices aren't the greatest which leaves groups such as pregnant women and newly borns highly susceptible to malnutrition.
The first project my community jumped at was my suggestion that we try to find a way to cut out the intermediaries in their trade of sesame seeds. Everyone here grows sesame seeds, but nobody knows what to do with them. They're grown here as a cash crop, but nobody has the means to transform them into oil or any edible form so their two alternatives have been to sell their sesame in small quantities to the neighboring village which undercuts them well below market value, or to simply walk around eating raw sesame seeds and trying to invite the white guy to come eat raw sesame seeds with them. Well they've done both of these in excess so naturally they were thrilled when I told them there might be another option. We've moved forward on creating a sesame co-op of local farmers with an elected bureau and recognition from the mayor's office. This gives us the ability to pool resources and hopefully find a larger buyer in a bigger city. We've had our first few rounds of meetings and its been going great so far, we won't actually have to sell anything until the end of the harvest which is in October so we have until then to make sure that everything has been organized and put into place so that we can move quickly after the harvest. This being Burkina everything could still go terribly wrong, but then again everything could still go terribly right.
Next up are my two projects more on the agricultural end of food security. I've always enjoyed gardening in the states and now I enjoy gardening in Burkina. It's a completely different challenge with all different gardening and composting techniques and more of a budget and resource constraint than one would experience in the states, but it has been fun these last six or so months learning all that I can about gardening, composting, and tree planting here in Burkina from a variety of interesting sources. In my own courtyard I have a small vegetable garden, a steadily growing collection of trees, and a small composting pit, while outside I have a larger pit for developing animal manure. How does this relate to the community? Well currently I am organizing two projects, one with the Health Clinic (CSPS) and one with the High School (Lycee) that I work at. At the CSPS we are going to start a Moringa forest that the clinic can use to create a high nutrition powder to give to women who have recently given birth to help counter malnutritient during the first three months. The forest will also give the clinic the oppurtunity to give out a small sapling at the same time as the initial distribution of powder so that the women can plant their own tree and have a replenishing stock of Moringa. Moringa is a tropical drought resistant tree well suited to sandy soils and absolutely packed with nutrients. You can use just about every part of the tree, but we will just be focusing on the leaves at first. If you are super duper interested in more info on this kickass tree feel free to google that bad boy and bask in its nutritious glory. In addition to the Moringa Forest, we are in the process of setting up a school garden to help improve our current hot lunch program which is currently a repeating cycle of beans, spaghetti, rice, beans spaghetti, rice, and so on. The vegetables would give the kids a much needed nutritian boost and we could use the garden in compound with some of our science courses which include a plant anatomy section as well as a study of soil structure (taught by yours truly). Both of these projects will hopefully be funded by a grant from a West African Food Secuitry organiziation which is why these projects are time consuming, writing and processing grants are never the easiest of things and when you add my current living conditions into the mix you can see my difficulties. Like the sesame co-op, nothing has gone wrong yet, but we still have plenty of time.
And last, but not least our school administration is hoping to add solar power to one of our classrooms to give the students someplace to study after the sun has set. Some students come from families that have enough money to have an extra flashlight that the student can use to study, but this is usually the male students who get the flashlight while the girls are left in the dark. So over the past weekend I've been biking all over the place with my counterparts to meet some electriciens and battery people to calculate costs and find materials to make this happen. This too will be written in the form of a grant and we're hoping to have it installed by the beginning of next school year.
I hope to keep you all updated of the different projects progress reports, but as with all things in my life these days keep the expectations low and you will never be disappointed. Until next time!
