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!