Day 77: Tuesday, November 15th – Marians Arrival (and others too)

The majority of this morning was dedicated to the usual hanging around and chilling. Not much really happened until around 2pm, when Marian arrived, along with 2 new project assistants and 1 of the Senegalese students. The new project assistants had arrived in Senegal the previous morning. However, being very experienced in development education and action research, adjusting to this new place didn’t seem to be too much of a problem for them.

We were informally introduced to these middle-aged women, named Nikki and Judy and I talked with them about their abrupt decision to come to Africa and help with our program. They were asked to come after Daniel (head the Living Routes program) had visited Yoff in October. Both of the women seem very knowledgeable and certainly competent enough to help us learn as much as we can here in the last few weeks of our program.

Also coming with Marian was Ronald, our (agriculture) group leader, and we were able to speak with the villagers and to go out to the community garden to make some concrete plans for doing work. There was some debate over how much of the community garden should be used for sweet potatoes and how much should be used for other vegetables. This debate went on for quite a while (us Americans just kind of standing there not understanding a word) but it was finally decided to use ¾ of the field for sweet potatoes and the remaining quarter for vegetables like turnips and carrots.