Day 78: Moving along

Because Ronald had returned the day before, we were able to get back to a more rigorous schedule. Our group (ag) had a meeting together to discuss our schedule for the upcoming week. In our plans included tasks such as preparing the drip irrigation system, getting the garden ready for crops, and training the villagers on how the drip system is built and used.

One of the tasks necessary for getting the garden ready was to spread a large amount of manure/soil on the field. After our scheduling meeting, we walked to the field and proceeded to commence filling buckets of this dirt stuff and dispersing the dirt over the existing soil. It’s important to understand that the current state of all the soil here is rather poor. To us northeasterners, it looks like we’re about to plant vegetables on a beach…However, it seems that other people are successful in growing crops here.

After at least a couple hours of shoveling dirt into buckets, we were almost finished spreading the soil over the field. We took a break and went home for lunch before returning to the garden to complete our work there. With the villagers, we manually mixed the brown soil that we had dropped on the field with the sand that was already there. To be quite honest, it still looks like a beach, but I think that there are a lot more nutrients in it now…

Marian left today for Dakar, saying that she had lots of work to finish, but that she hoped to return before our stay here is finished.

For our group, it’s nice to see that we’re really starting to get some work done. It’s quite remarkable how things can go so slowly, and how difficult it is to make progress sometimes. However, today was another step towards completing what we have come to do here. There’s certainly plenty more work to do, and hopefully enough time…