Toubab Dialao and a village visit

My first few weeks with Agrecol Afrique have been a lot of fun so far, and I'm learning so much here. Agrecol is a non-profit NGO, and so while there are mostly regular paid employees, there are also a few interns from Senegalese universities, as well three volunteers/interns from SUCO, a Canadian volunteer organization that is a little similar to the Peace Corps. They're Quebecois and speak mostly French, but enough English that our conversations frequently slip into a mix of the two. It's still difficult for me to properly express myself in French when I get excited or angry about a topic, and agriculture has its own vocabulary which I am doing my best to learn.


Monday and Tuesday the whole organization, about thirty people total, had a conference and retreat at Toubab Dialao, a tourist town on the Petit Cote which is about an hour and a half's drive from Thiès. We stayed at the Sobo Badé, a lovely sprawling collection of bungalows built out of stone and decorated with seashells. It sits right on the edge of the sea-cliffs, and there was a lovely breeze around. We went swimming in the ocean - the first time I've been swimming in the ocean here, as I never found the time to go in Dakar. It was a lot of fun, though the waves were much stronger than I'm used to, my other major experiences with the ocean being on the Florida side of the Gulf of Mexico and in South Carolina. At night, me and a few of the Canadian volunteers went out in search of a drink (the hotel bar was ruinously expensive) and when we were walking along the beach, we saw hordes of little crabs scuttling about, which made me rather nostalgic for family ghost-crabbing adventures. I didn't get any photos, as I forgot my smartphone and my camera is being a little difficult right now, but there are some of the hotel on that link, and here's a few my coworker Abdoulaye took:

Crocheting by the seaside

The view from the cliffside - those are fishermen on the left

We also got some real work and conversation done - I got to see presentations on all the major projects of Agrecol Afrique, including a food security program in the Casamance (I wish I were able to do work there, but security concerns mean that MSID does not usually allow students to work there), a shiny new version of the website to be revealed soon, and a presentation on the Naturel-Biologique labeling program, or Nat-Bi (biologique means organic in French). I may be able to do some work with the Nat-Bi program in the next few weeks, if my schedule permits.

Wednesday I got back to find that my library project has been a little derailed - what little progress I had made had been undone by a well-meaning janitor stacking the books back in the closet, rather than leaving them in the organized piles I'd had them in on the floor. To them, I'm sure it looked like I had just thrown them willy-nilly around on the floor, but there was the beginning of a system there! I never thought I'd daydream about steel bookcases with movable shelving, but when all you have to organize with is a dirty closet,with three tall, deep shelves, what were once the most mundane solutions seem very appealing. I think I'm going to put the project on hold until (unless) we can get a hold of some milk crates or other boxes for organizing the books - otherwise I'll just be putting them in slightly more organized stacks, which, much as I hate to say it, is not a very good use of my time.


Thursday I went with the technicians to see some of the field sites where Agrecol does work - three villages, two with women's collectives and one with a general farming collective. At the first village, Koulouck, we brought seeds and helped plant a few beds of onions. In the second, Mboulouckhtène, the program focuses on okra production and chickens - meat, not eggs. Ngemme, the third village, hosts the largest collective - 17 men and 10 women each work large plots of organic tomatoes, peppers, hibiscus, and other vegetables which they then sell to Agrecol. We had ataaya, freshly roasted peanuts, and vegetable stew with rice with the farmers in the shade of a baobab and weighed and recorded the harvests of the week. It's very odd for me to see a land in full bloom in November, after growing up in a place where there's only one growing season, which has already passed by this time of year. 



My second week in Thiès was very well-spent, and I look forward to the adventures that this week will bring!