You can lead a horse to water…

But you can’t make it drink. In this case the horse is the people of Bababe and the water is a 10 fold return on a minimal investment after 4 months. It has been an interesting lesson on the difference of the culture here. Let me start from the beginning:

As you know I my objective here is environmental education in the schools and the community. As schools are (still) just starting, I have spent most of my time so far thinking about community projects. It’s rare to find an environmental project that actually makes money and for every 10 good ideas I think I have I always find reasons why 9 of them just wouldn’t work, but my idea of a for profit tree nursery passed both of those tests.

Being that Mauritania is mostly desert, sporting more people that it can naturally support, and sheep, goats, and cattle eat any new shoots, its safe to say that reforestation is an important issue. Therefore, the need exists. In the two large towns surrounding mine there are tree nurseries, but they fail to meet the needs of my community for two reasons. One, they are not near the market in their towns, which is expensive to get to anyway, and the trees are overly expensive with a starting price of 200 UM ($1). Having already started my own small tree nursery in order to put some greenery in public spaces, I realized that trees can be grown for less than 10 UM ($0.05). You only need to pay for the bags to put them in and a little bit of water, all the other materials, sunlight, dirt, poop, and seeds, are free. Therefore, if a person had a tree nursery of 100 trees and sold just 10 of them for 100 UM, half the price that the tree nurseries were charging, she would get all of her money back, and still have 90 trees to sell. That’s a pretty big safety net. I liked the idea for two reasons, it would be a money maker for women’s cooperatives, and most importantly it would reduce the cost of saplings to the level where people in the community would buy and plant them on their own without any encouragement. (It’s too hot inside the concrete houses during the day, so people either build hangars or plant trees. I don’t think it would be possible to have too many shade trees here.) I talked this idea over with a bunch of Mauritanians and they both loved it and thought it would work. (A number of old ladies blessed me for doing it :) I had the help of Doudou Ba, a native Mauritanian who is currently working and studying in the U.S. with the translation of the whole idea into Pulaar so I knew that it was clear. All I had to do was give the presentation and it would be gravy. And that’s where it fell apart.

All along, I had been looking for why the idea might not work. The trouble was is that I was only looking at the idea, which is pretty much flawless and forgot about the people. It was a combination of two factors that doomed the first presentation; first, the failure of a few key people to contact the women’s cooperatives like they promised me to, second, call it satisfaction with the way life currently is, disinterest, or laziness, but of the many people who knew about it, liked the idea, and promised attendance, no one showed up. Given the amount of work that I had put into pulling this all together, researching the other tree nurseries, starting a demonstration nursery, arranging for tree nursery bags to be sold in the community, creating a presentation, translating the presentation, and promoting the presentation, it was pretty disappointing to not have anyone there. However, I may have lost the battle, but the war is far from over.

In reality it is only a minor set back and lesson on the community with which I am working. After Halloween I’ll give another presentation, only this time explain the project more clearly, target who I invite better, and make sure that the people “helping” me actually do. The actual process of setting up the presentation was not done well enough is all. It was good enough for the U.S. but not for here. I will take the time to do it Mauritanian style next time.