How does your garden grow?

Some of the major challenges facing Senegal involve malnutrition, degradation, soil degradation, unsanitary drinking water, diseases, food shortages, and others. One simple and local way to address many of these problems is through proper gardening. Utilizing the right plants and trees and possessing the basic knowledge for gardening can have sizable impacts on an individual’s and community’s well-being. For this reason, Peace Corps has been giving us the 101 of gardening for Senegal.

With my language group in Tassette, we made a plan to start a garden at the local primary school. We met with the principal / director of the school, sat down and discussed our expectations, and went around to every classroom and introduced ourselves. That same day, we pick out a plot of land for our multiple beds and tree nursery. We began the “double digging” process, found some good manure to mix into our soil, and prepared our beds for seeding and/or transplants. It was insane! The entire primary school wanted to participate and we had only about 2 hours of Wolof training at that point. A couple days into our project we realized that garden happened to be accumulating a lot of trash and little people footprints. A week into our project, the building that we started one of beds next too began to be torn down. Yep, a school actually fell on our garden. Curiously, the director did not inform us that the building next to our garden was going to be toppling on it the next week.

Amul jafe jafe. (No problem). We moved that bed and built a fence around the perimeter of our garden, so now it actually looks a little bit legitimate. We water it every day, but I don’t know what the prospect for germination is since we are not in the rainy season. The hype of “toubaabs” in the school has worn off a little bit, so our numbers have diminished and it’s mostly kids that actually want to help out. This week, our spirits were lifted when we saw our Moringa seeds germinating as well as the beans we planted. It’s a crapshoot, but the ends could actually end up justifying the means.

Our somewhat legitimate garden.