The day I understood the saying, “It takes a village”…

The day I understood the saying, “It takes a village”… 

Double Digging My Garden:

After coming back to my site from Dakar, I decided it was time to start my gardening project. The thing about the soil in Senegal is…. well, it is usually horrible. So, in order to get a good crop it is best to do a double digging technique where you separate the topsoil from the subsoil, till each layer and add supplements to each layer. The supplements that are “readily available” here in Senegal are wood ash, peanut shells, manure, and charcoal. It’s important to have the correct ratio of nitrogen and carbon in the supplements for optimal water retention and plant heath. 

Currently it is Ramadan (My next blog is going to be about Ramadan in Senegal) and people are fasting all day (not eating OR drinking ANYTHING ALL day from 5:30isham (after sunrise) until about 7:30ish pm (sunset) in the extreme 100+ degree humid heat), so most people are resting/sleeping the hot parts of the day because they don’t have any energy and if they get too hot, they can’t drink anything to rehydrate themselves. I was also fasting to experience the culture, but I decided that I couldn’t rest like everyone else and I had to start my garden project. I got as far as measuring out my three beds, sectioning them off in thirds, taking off the top soil and tilling the subsoil in all three beds before I realized that I still needed to gather the soil supplements. My little sister, Tida, came over and she volunteered to help me after she saw how much work I did already alone. Here, the pecking order for work around the house is the younger kids pretty much do everything, so if you are an adult, you command the younger ones to do all your work, regardless if they are already super busy with other chores. In that sense, I think she might have felt obligated to help me, but, I accepted her help regardless of the guilt. She helped me go to compound to compound to collect all their wood ash from their cooking huts, collect all the cracked peanut shells, and then scoop up random piles of manure to mix into the soil. Then, she helped me mix the soil and dig, when my blisters popped open and it was painful for me to till, she called a few other boys from the village to help till and shovel. When my supplement supplies were exhausted, she called for her friend to go gather more manure and wood ash while we continued working. (Let me just say, at this point my work consisted of breaking up large poop clumps into a small dust like consistency. Yea, I wanted to title this blog, “The day I played with poop,” but I decided against it.) Then, when it was time rake and water the soil, another girl came to get my buckets to draw water from the well. I started the venture alone, but by the time my three flower beds were finished being dug, my whole village was involved, either by giving me their supplies, gathering goods, helping me with the actual labor, or just coming to check out the progress of the work. When I was finishing up building the walls for the beds, I thought to myself, “this must be where the saying, ‘it takes a village’ came from.”

It is incredible how people work together and help each other out here. In so many ways I feel overwhelmed by the differences in culture and standards of living, but when I sit back and reflect on the positive aspects of those differences, I am truly grateful that I am experiencing all of this first hand. There is definitely beauty in the imperfections. 

Coming up Next: Ramadan, aka, the month of starvation, and how my experience with it thus far..