Update from Pulaarville

The last few weeks in Senegal have been a roller coaster of travel, some work, and a lot of emotion. Since I’ve stated in my first entry that this blog is going to be very light on the emotional side of things, I’ll continue the trend by focusing primarily on the work and travel aspects in order to catch you all up to speed.

Work—My job as a Sustainable Agricultural Volunteer has a primary focus in assisting rural Senegalese men and women increase crop yields through the introduction of new seed varieties and the reinforcement of positive, sustainable, planting, maintaining, and harvesting methods. The five main field crops PC extends and works with in Senegal are rice, corn, millet, sorghum, and beans. From a work perspective, however, there is little for me to do at this time with the five main crops because they won’t be planted until the rainy season (approximately 7 months from now). Instead, in order to keep busy and keep sane I’ve been trying to maintain secondary projects I inherited from the Volunteer before me (beekeeping, fruit tree maintenance, and winter season gardening to have more disposable income, just to name a few), as well as try and introduce new vegetables to winter season gardens and improved poultry raising practices.

About two weeks ago I ran up to Dakar in order to purchase seed potatoes for my winter season garden demo plot---1,300 potatoes later I came back to Kolda with the ambition of making potatoes a potential sixth mono-crop in the southern region of Senegal. Super ambitious--yes, potentially a catastrophic failure---absolutely. I sank my own money into the project because at this stage of things I am still a new Volunteer to my village and have only just begun the process of gaining their trust in terms of my agricultural knowledge and dedication to working for and in the village. I chose potatoes as my newfound obsession because for as long as I can remember my family back in VA has grown potatoes, and because if all goes well potatoes have the potential to be not only a huge money maker, but a relatively dependable added source of food and nutrition. If all goes well the potatoes will be in the ground (and off my hut floor) in the next week or so, and harvested around the time I come back from IST in Dakar.

Poultry raising thus far has been slow going, but my first model chicken coop should be finished within the next two days. In a couple weeks the first chickens will be relocated from within my family’s compound to the new roosts, and in theory begin a more balanced cycle of protein/money generation. I’m looking forward to the work not only because of potentially very visible results, but because I’m going to be working very closely with my youngest brother in the village. Not only is this brother one of the coolest Senegalese I’ve met in country, he is only thirteen but already driven to do well in school and eventually pursue his one passion in life---helping animals. That’s right, he’s still in middle school but wants to be a vet. No matter how the project works out in the long run its going to be a lot of fun to work with him because he’s one hell of a hard worker.

Travel—As mentioned before I’ve had to travel a lot recently, both by going up to and back from Dakar. For those of you who have mentioned possibly wanting to visit me during my service, this can be an extremely uncomfortable trip crammed into a sept place, but there are definitely ways to mitigate any and all of the negatives. Lastly, having made the trip from the south to Dakar and back I can unequivocally say that I will probably never venture north of Dakar throughout the remainder of my service. Sure there are some nice beaches and St. Louis to the far north, but I’m perfectly happy with the monkeys, vegetation, and rainfall south of the Gambia.

Emotions--Having really started to settle into my site these last few weeks I’ve had a lot more down time to reflect on family, friends, and home. Whereas “home” is now a more flexible entity, thoughts of family and friends are always with me. I miss you all tremendously, but the phone calls, emails, and letters keep me on the level, and stop me from every getting too high or too low. On this side of the Atlantic things continue to improve…my host family/village feels like family more and more every day. This in turn gives me more and more motivation to work my ass of throughout my service in order to potentially improve their quality of life, no matter how incrementally.

Love you and miss you all, post general questions here, or if you’re like some of my friends and have more off the wall questions---email davidpshames @ gmail.com