Paradise Found

Almost ever since I arrived in Segou, this guy Thierno Mamadou Diallo has been asking for my help with this, that, and the other thing. I’m sorry to say that I brushed him off a lot at first. It’s often very difficult to tell the difference between someone who is sincerely asking for help and someone just looking for a handout. I was also plenty busy with the ecolodge. However it slowly dawned on me that he was serious and, more importantly, motivated. Whenever I was around he would lecture whoever else was present about how Americans don’t like to give money but they like to teach people how to do things and how much better that is that just giving money. Essentially, he completely understood what PCVs come here to do. So I started hanging out with him and his family. They are the bread bakers in town and for the longest time I thought that baking was their main occupation. I was very wrong.

Lately I have been visiting their mud oven occasionally to chat with them and teach them how to make different kinds of bread. They were really excited about corn bread because they grow corn, but they can’t grow wheat here. Cutting the bread with corn could significantly reduce their costs. While I was working with them on that they kept repeatedly asking me to visit their garden. I always told them I would when I had the time but never made it a priority. I had always pictured their garden as a normal village garden. That they would have a few beds in a fenced in area near their house and that their ambition to grow a lot of vegetables would be limited by the difficultly of having to pull water out of a well. This was part of the reason I never took a serious interest in it. This was a big mistake.

I remember now that Thierno Mamadou was very interested in an intensive Moringa garden bed I made behind my hut. Moringa is a “miracle” tree that has leaves that are so nutritious they are basically multivitamins. It will also grow well in dry conditions. Even though it’s a tree if you plant the seeds close together and keep cutting the trunks back you can grow them like they were a vegetable. This allows one to keep harvesting the leaves almost indefinitely. I also remember that he had been asking me for a while for a book in French on gardening. I finally found the book for him shortly before I visited their garden.

One day last week Bassirou, Thierno Mamadou’s son, and I set off to finally go take a look at their garden. I was surprised to learn that it was not right next to their house. Then I was surprised to learn that it was not even in the village. I was even more surprised to learn that it was not just outside the village. We had been walking for about twenty minutes when all the sudden a valley opened up below us and I saw a HUGE garden full of mango, banana, papaya, orange, lime, and avocado trees. Not to mention the well laid out garden beds. Before I even stepped foot into the garden I could tell it was the best garden I have seen in the area. However there were bigger surprises to come.

Once we climbed over the fence Bassirou immediately took me to the garden beds and showed me how he planted the cabbage and onions. “We used the recommended spacing from the book you gave us. Did we do it right?” he said. I was floored. Disseminating information is normally very difficult. Culturally Senegalese don’t like to share information and they are therefore wary of anything anyone tells them. They also don’t like to try anything new. PCVs often give crystal clear trainings on why certain gardening techniques are better, including physical evidence, and still people will stick to their current way of doing things. What Bassirou and his father had just done was to read something in a book and follow it exactly without anyone proving to them that it was really going to work. Moreover, they also put in the recommended amount of manure into the beds before they started planting, which they read about in the book. When I read the book I didn’t even notice it said that! The next surprise came when I was looking around and saw a perfect intensive Moringa bed. Thierno Mamadou had seen what I had done and copied it on his own. When I told a fellow volunteer about this she started beating her head because she is currently trying everything she can think of to get at least one person in her village to make an intensive Moringa bed. The surprises weren’t over yet though. Turning around I noticed that there was a hose with water running out of it sitting on the ground. I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was so impossible that it could be there. I knew they did not have enough money for a deep bore well and motor pump or even to pay for the gas if it already existed. I quickly followed the hose up the hill until I found what it was attached to: nothing. They just had it sitting in the pool of water created by a natural spring. Since the spring was up the hill from the garden, all they had to do was stick the end of a hose in it and they could water their whole garden! At this point my mind was exploding with the possibilities of what the could do with their garden. However the mental hyperventilation really started when Bassirou said, “Oh yeah, we have two springs like this.” For those of you following along at home, you have to keep in mind that it only rains from May to September here, so gardening during the rest of the year requires watering by hand every day and with the exception of Thierno Mamadou’s garden, that means pulling water out of a well do to so. Having water that naturally runs out the end of a hose here is paradise.

I’m kicking myself now for not going to see their garden earlier. If I had I would have spent A LOT of time there working with them instead of laying in my hammock reading when I didn’t have anything going on at the ecolodge. It’s really nice to be working in the dirt and growing things again. Safe to say from now on, I’ll be there a lot.