NetLife Experiences and Crafting some Grafting

NetLife Experiences

To the other side of a mountain and back... and nothing to show for it but a pair of busted Birkenstocks.

Months ago, an NGO named NetLife, founded by a former Kedougou PCV currently in med school, contacted a volunteer from our region in hopes of a partnership. He had lots of mosquito nets to distribute, but given his rigorous med school schedule was unable to come to Senegal to actually give them away. Enter Peace Corps volunteers.

As part of our regional plan, we decided to concentrate on one Rural Community (a political division consisting of a dozen or so villages) per year, and to get nets over every bed in that rural community. This year we decided to focus on Fongolimbi. Given its location on top of a mountain, Fongolimbi is often overlooked by other NGOs because it’s so difficult to access.

The volunteer that NetLife approached, Robyn, had formerly been stationed in Fongolimbi and so took the lead. With the help of the local health infrastructure she organized the local health relays to do surveys to find out how many beds were in the community, who was sleeping in them, and how many of them had mosquito nets over them.

Given that information, she ordered the nets from NetLife – 4,000 in all – got them all the way down here from Dakar in a truck, and then organized a car to take the appropriate amount to each village.

Then, for an entire week, in shifts of a few days, the volunteers of Kedougou went from village to village distributing the nets to individuals. We would set up in one person’s compound in the village, and then call the heads of family in one by one. They had to present an identification card for each person who was to receive a net. We then removed each net from the packaging and wrote the person’s name, village, and the year on each net. The idea was to given the person a sense of ownership over the net and prevent it from being resold in the market.

A team of two, working basically dawn until sometimes after dusk, could cover two villages in a day. I was on the last shift with Nik, another volunteer from our region. We were stationed in the capital of the Rural Community, the town of Fongolimbi, and stayed there each night and ate there, going out to the different villages during the day.

On the way back from our first distribution a storm hit. While riding along the plateau on top of the mountain, the rain began to fall. At first we began riding really fast, trying to beat the rain, but as it fell harder and harder we slowly accepted our soaking fate. The shift in frame-of-mind allowed us to really enjoy the ride and do some ‘real’ mountain biking – taking huge puddles and streams head on. Then the lightening came. At first the distant grumbles provided a soothing soundtrack. But as they grew nearer we grew more anxious. Finally a bolt struck so close that the delay between the light and the pound didn’t even allow me enough time to turn my head. Luckily, we arrived back in town unscathed, but a boy in the town hadn’t been so lucky. He had been struck by lightening and received burns all over his body.

Two days later, Nik and I were given an adventurous assignment: Samba Galou. No Peace Corps volunteer had ever been to Samba Galou. It was on the back side of the first ridge of the mountain range that runs along the border of Senegal and Guinea. Completely inaccessible by car, we had to send the nets to the village on the backs of four bikes ridden by some boys from the village. And the village was scarcely accessible by bike. After spending the night in a village on top of the mountain, a guide took Nik and me down the other side on a rocky path, or a collection of rocks.

When we inquired about a gentle bellow we heard in the distance, he told us there was a waterfall a little ways off the path. So we left our bikes and wandered off into the woods. My Birkenstock sandals had slowly been deteriorating. The hike up the front side of the mountain that was too steep and rocky for a bike had been hard on them. And biking through all of the rain finally did them in. As I tried to hike toward the waterfall my feet kept slipping off to the side. In fear of rolling my ankle miles from any help and in the middle of the mountains, I left my sandals with the bikes and sought the waterfall barefoot. We emerged on top of a cliff, overlooking a majestic, rolling waterfall with multiple layers. We pulled out Nik’s camera to take a picture of it, but the battery had died. Content with the idea that we were possibly the only Americans ever to have seen these falls, we moved on to our task at hand.

After having distributed the nets in Samba Galou, the entire project was officially finished. I still didn’t have any functioning shoes though, and so gave a village boy $2 and asked him to find me some sandals. Forty five minutes later he returned with a new white pair of plastic sandals. So we headed back to Kedougou, but not by retracing our steps through Fongolimbi. We heard that there was a direct path from the village to Kedougou over the mountain. So we asked the villagers about it and they confirmed that indeed, a path did exist. They showed us to the beginning of it, and said, “When you see a bamboo fence, go right, not left. It should take you about three hours.”

With the detailed directions stowed safely in our heads, we embarked. The images on the ride that ensued will be forever sketched in my memory, but given the lifeless camera, I won’t be able to share them with any of you. A cave with roots that came through the rocky ceiling to form a prison cell. Bamboo that had grown so tall on each side of the path that it arched to form a tunnel. A path through a marsh that was under two inches of water for thirty minutes. The great, broad Gambia river valley and swimming in the fast-flowing water. A village in a mountain pass painted in a rainbow of green. We came upon an unexpected fork in the road (well after the bamboo fence) and didn’t know which way to go. So we rested and ate a well-deserved feast of crackers, beef jerkey, and sardines. As luck would have it, a man came along while we ate and told us the correct path to take.

We finally came into Kedougou from the “other” side, crossing the river in a small boat, and arriving at the regional house with nothing but a tale and - as mentioned before - a busted pair of Birkestocks.


Crafting some Grafting

Below is the summary of a training session I did about grafting that I wrote for the Peace Corps Senegal website. To remind you as briefly as possible, grafting is a technique through which orchard owners cut a branch from a tree with good fruit and paste it onto another they have just planted to ensure that the new tree will bear equally good fruit in the future.

A mango grafting training session for Malinké speaking farmers in the department of Kedougou was organized by PCVs Amy Truong and Andy Jondahl on August 13, 2008 . The training was funded with money from the Small Project Assistance (SPA) program fund.

Eighteen of the area’s most motivated tree farmers attended the training, which was hosted by Sina Danfakha. Danfakha is a dynamic farmer from a village 30km from Kedougou with a great example of a young orchard employing many of the agroforestry techniques promoted by the Peace Corps.

Demba Samoura, a local grafting expert, conducted the training. He conducted the training in Malinké (his first language) allowing the participating farmers to understand in depth the benefits and techniques of grafting.

It began in Danfakha’s compound with each farmer introducing himself and explaining what work he is doing with trees. Next, Samoura gave a short lecture about grafting and showed the farmers how to prepare plastic for the wrapping. Then he did a demonstration graft on a mango branch, carefully explaining each step of the process. Then every farmer practiced a graft on his own. When Samoura had approved each farmer’s work, they all went down to Danfakha’s orchard and grafted six mango trees. Later, everyone returned to Danfakha’s compound for a big lunch and group picture.

The training was a great success, particularly because the volunteers played such a minor role. They did the organizational work leading up to the training, but did very little during the actual event.