Saving the soils and more

As most of you know already, I've decided to stay in Burkina for an extra three months so that I'll have time to complete a project that I've started with community members from my village. The Burkinabe that I'm collaborating with the most on the project is a government-trained agricultural trainer named Eric. He approached me last fall asking if I could help him to finance a project that he proposed, and we started to carry out those activities last February.

The main part of the project involves teaching community members about soil preservation techniques. Burkina Faso is a serious subject to the problem of desertification, due in no small part to deforestation and excessive livestock grazing. Those two causes combine to vastly reduce the vegetation that would otherwise hold down the soil and its nutrients in times of wind and flood, leaving us with sand and thin dirt that can barely support the staple crops of corn, millet, sorghum, peanuts, and beans that they grow from June through October.

Most community members are aware that soil quality, and thus crop yields, have gone down over the years, but they only have vague ideas of the cause and they don't know what to do to stop it. Most of them assume that that's just the way that things are, but when you tell them that there are things they can do to stop the trend, they perk up and listen. That's where we come in; Eric helped to form an association of about 30 community members from Mane's satellite villages, and he is teaching them different techniques like compost, rock lines, zai holes, and tree planting to help reverse the effects of soil degradation.

Eric, our painfully skinny trainer, explains the principles of composting

We did a series of training sessions in February through April on those techniques and started 4 tree nurseries to plant over 500 trees. A cool thing was that Eric also came to my science club at the school and gave a talk on tree planting, which inspired one of my students, Larba, to plant his own tree nursery for profit. Larba now has several hundred trees growing in the nursery that he planted in his courtyard, and he told me that he will make over $200 when he sells them to the community members who pre-ordered them in April. Maybe that doesn't sound like that much, but that is a HUGE sum of money for a kid in a village like this. I could have cried, I was so pleased. He is so excited about the money that he'll make from it that he says he'll try to expand the business in the future, and he has also already started to train other people in the community about the care of trees also. If the only thing that I accomplished in my 2.5 years in Burkina was to get someone to start a thriving tree-planting business, I would be happy.

Rock lines and zai holes help to catch water and prevent erosion due to flooding

We got a little under $4000 of grant money from the West African Food Security Partnership (WAFSP), which gives grants to Peace Corps volunteers, to support us with the project. The money will go toward materials like pickaxes and shovels (necessary for digging zai holes), plus benches and tables for the construction of a training center, among other smaller items. The training center will be particularly useful in the future not only for further agricultural trainings that Eric carries out, but also for literacy classes. Eric teaches literacy in Moore in his village, so when the benches and tables aren't in use for agricultural purposes they'll double as a classroom for the community.

The second part of the project involves opening a garden for Eric's association. Most of the grant money is going toward the cost of fencing and gardening supplies, and the garden will be constructed in the next couple of months. Although almost everyone participates in the cultivation of staple crops during the rainy season, few people grow vegetables. Cabbage, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers all grow well in this area, and growing those crops is a lucrative dry-season activity. (They're generally watered by hand from well or pump water.) Eric will do training sessions how to manage a garden, and the association will then cooperate to grow vegetables to sell and to improve their own nutrition from November through May.

Seeing how skinny the residents of the targeted villages are, and how many of their babies suffer from acute malnutrition, it's easy to see how needed this project is. I hope that we'll be able to slow the trend of desertification for them at least a little, and maybe with time, those practices will spread to the whole community.

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Regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa: Luckily, it has remained contained in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia thus far, none of which countries borders Burkina directly. The risk here is still quite low, so please don't worry about me. I refer you to this blog post by a volunteer who got evacuated from Guinea, as well as this Onion article (referenced in the aforementioned blog post).

For those who I haven't talked with about it yet, I'll be closing my service here on December 12th to arrive back in California on December 13th. I'll also be flying to Tanzania with my dad 3 weeks from today to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. So that's what's happening with me.