Day 79: All Work

This morning, I woke up with the assumption that it would be a pretty easy day; laid back, relaxing, etc. This would not be so. After meeting up with the others in our group, we immediately went off to the fields where we began working. On the agenda for the day was to irrigate the field by flooding it. While I still haven’t figured out why this was a necessary step, I just have to trust that our 3 village farmers know what they are doing. Anyway, they say that before planting and installing a drip system, it’s necessary to get a water pump and flood the field, further mixing the nutrients with the soil.

Setting up the water pump was the first step. As can be seen in my pictures, the water pump was set up to get the water from the channel (running alongside the garden) to the channel leading to our field. With a crew of about 9 men, we placed the large moto/water pump in a location where it could complete its task. Following that, we dug channels to guide the water to our field, which we wanted to flood.

All of this took quite a good amount of time. Something that should be noted: There’s lots of watermelon here, and it’s usually delivered on trucks that are totally full of them. So, as we were working, a truck drove by, and I saw that it was full of watermelon. Off I went, running after the truck screaming “HAL, HAL!!” (Wolof for watermelon). Overjoyed, I caught up with the truck while it slowed down. A man riding in the back handed me two watermelons, and I carried them back to my fellow workers in the field. This scenario occurred a few times throughout the day, and we ended up eating about seven or eight watermelons…I felt sick by the end. We called ourselves “customs” as we demanded watermelons from each truck that passed…

Anyway, after preparing the pump and the channels, we turned on the pump and soaked the garden. It’s really hard to accurately describe it; I took a ton of pictures though…”flood irrigation.”

After flooding the garden, we sat down and waited for lunch to be delivered. By this point, it was almost 3pm and we were all pretty hungry. Finally, some boys came on a cart (pulled by a donkey) and gave us the lunch that our families had prepared for us. After lunch and a break, we began preparing the field to be flooded once more. After successfully doing so, we walked back to the village.

After spending 8 hours out in the sun working, we were all pretty exhausted and went to bed rather early…