More Murals!

Friday my neighbor Peter at I biked down to Keur Madialbel to help Jessica paint some murals at the Case de Tout Petits (House of All Smalls) preschool. It was a long day and the director was your typical loud, opinionated Senegalese man, but I think they came out pretty nice in the end.

Promoting girls education

Wash your hands with soap!

Nutrition pyramid, Senegalese style

Mural Madness

Probably the most enjoyable projects to engage in here in Senegal is mural painting. Its cheap (around $10), only takes a day or two, and provides you with an immediate tangible result. The best part is it requires absolutely no local language and no interaction with Senegalese people...you can pop in your headphones pick up your brushes and paint all day without ever having to speak a word to anyone.

When I first put up the world map in my room and realized that not a single child could find Senegal on the map or even identify the continent of Africa I decided to do a mural series at the school focusing on geography. I started out with a regional map of Senegal in three of the classrooms and Jen, my new neighbor Peter and I just completed a map of Africa this past Saturday. My plan is to do a map of Africa in every classroom and then do larger murals that are unique to each class. I'm hoping to do a gigantic world map on the back wall of one class, world flags on the back wall of another and the crest of Senegal on the back of another.

My obsession with muraling has recently spread beyond the walls of the school, and I've been painting just about anything that stands still long enough. I've painted two new chalkboards in my hut for writing out my to do lists and important dates, and I even put the Peace Corps logo on the outside of my hut (just in case people forget why I'm here). Jen and I have also looked into painting health related murals at the new health post being built in our road town and the staff seemed really enthusiastic about it. Our goal is to do at least one mural in each village every month for as long as we have things to paint. If you have any ideas for murals I'd love to hear them, but keep it simple...I'm no Picasso!

Universal Nut Sheller

Harvesting peanuts is a lot of work, but even after the fields are empty and the men have gone back to their tea-drinking the women's job is far from done. From November until June they can be found almost every day sitting amidst mountains of peanuts and shelling them, one by one, by hand. I became an expert peanut sheller during my first three months in the village and once i built up the required calluses I found it be be quite therapeutic...sitting in the shade, chatting with my neighbors and smashing each peanut in just the right spot on a rock or piece of wood. Crack. Crack. Crack.

Everyone enjoys a little social nut shelling every now and then, but the women in my village admitted that it is an extremely tedious job. One that takes up every free minute between cooking meals, doing laundry and taking care of children (and husbands). When I asked them what they would do with their time if they didn't have to shell peanuts one woman replied, "Nothing! I would sit around and drink tea like the men, or visit my sister, or take a nap."

There are several different types of mechanized nut shellers available in Senegal, but some require electricity while others have a tendency to break the peanuts (reducing their value) and all of them are extremely expensive, bulky and hard to maintain. However the Universal Nut Sheller, designed by a group called The Full Belly Project, is a promising and affordable alternative to the commercial models. It was first brought to Senegal a few years ago by a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kedougou region, and since it can be manufactured locally and is extremely simple to use volunteers in other villages have had a lot of success with it.

The Kaolack region is also known as the "peanut basin" of Senegal, so at a regional meeting in August we discussed the merits of trying to bring the Universal Nut Sheller technology home to our villages. After seeing a video of the machine on my camera and hearing it described by Bassirou who attended a demonstration with me, the women's group in my village decided to pool their resources and purchase a machine for Sambande. I brought the money to Kaolack where several volunteers had trained a local metal worker to produce the machines, and a month later it arrived in our village on the back of a Peace Corps car.

The machine and the volunteers and staff that delivered it were welcomed with enthusiasm and a lot of drumming and dancing. It took a good 15 minutes to get the women to settle down enough to actually teach them how to use the machine, but within 20 minutes they were practicing shelling hand fulls of peanuts by just turning a crank. After the technical training Awa Traore, a local Peace Corps employee, taked to the women about the money-making possibilities of the machine, what it might look like for them to charge people from other villages a nominal fee to shell their peanuts. The women seemed excited to start up their own small-scale enterprise in addition to having loads more free time. I have a feeling the women in my village will be taking a lot more naps this year.

The video that started it all. I took it lengthwise on my camera

but I can't rotate it on my computer so you're going to have to turn your head!

The Harvest Begins...

 Last week the boys brought in the first of the peanuts from the fields, indicating the start of the harvest season, which for me and the women in my family means hours of sitting on our butts on little stools surrounded by mountains of peanut plants, separating the nuts from the roots. Its a monumental task, so each household takes turns harvesting their fields on different days and everyone in the village gathers under the big party tree to help collect them. Its kind of like a big block party, with men popping in and out, women gossiping and kids running around and jumping in the big piles of discarded peanut plants just like American kids jump in piles of leaves.

After the plant is discarded and the buckets are all full the peanuts get sorted one last time to remove the empty shells and any debris before the majority are stuffed into big 4foot tall "bodybags" and shipped off to Kaolack to be sold to a peanut oil company. The leftovers are dried out in the sun and will become the staple of our diets for the next 6-8 months. The peanut butter here is really good, but everyone thinks I'm crazy for eating it raw. Senegalese people only use it to make Maafe, a kind of peanut sauce that could be really good except that they put dried fish into it so it tastes like the Jersey Shore smells and you never know when you'll choke on a hidden bone. The biggest peanuts are soaked in salt water and roasted in hot sand to be sold as a snack and the runts of the litter get pounded up to make Bahal, a very dry dish of rice, peanut crumbs and crumbled up MSG bullion cubes.

The "rough sort" where any empty shells are removed from the pile

The "fine sort" where any remaining debris is picked out
before packing them up

My sister Oumi, less than enthusiastic about the work

Peanut roots with a plethora of peanuts pleading to be picked!

First Funded Projects!

Now that the rainy season is winding down and the school year is about to begin, I'm finally able to get started on some real concrete work. First up is a latrine at the school in conjunction with two new well covers, both of which will help reduce disease in the village. Both of these projects are being funded by Appropriate Projects, an organization that works only with Peace Corps volunteers to fund small scale shovel-ready water and sanitation projects around the world. They rely on donations for each individual project, but they pre-fund everything which means I don't have to sit around waiting for money to come in before I can do my work. I applied last week and the money is being wired to me on the 19th! If you want to know more about the latrine project it's listed on their website HERE. And the link to the well cover project can be found HERE.