A jour e bon?

I'm back at the Peace Corps training center for two weeks of Agricultural/French/Fulfulde lessons and it is awesome. I am eating really good food. I had green beans today and nearly peed myself with joy. Back in, say 1992, had my Mom said, "David James, you're going to eat this green beans now because one day you won't have them and you'll even crave them," I would have called her a big liar and said I was just gonna eat my french fries and candy bars. Well, those green beans today definitely filled my belly with pure food-joy.

I have been here a week and am looking forward to another week because the food and company is just so easy to appreciate. In the Peace Corps, the number one lesson to learn is the value and quality of what you normally take for granted (such as green beans!). When you're at site out in the sticks eating "To," reading by a kerosene lamp and listening to people you barely know babble on in Dogon in front of their rock houses, you can only imagine how good a burger, a beer and someone to speak English would be at that time. Comfort food has a way deeper meaning for me now.

Besides the food (can you tell how happy it makes me?) I am actually learning a lot of really practical information that I will bring back to site and implement there. My first goal is to train the villagers to make and use compost. As of now, they take straight up cow poop and just place it on the fields. Generally this adds too much nitrogen to the soil and causes the plants to turn yellow and "burn." Although making compost seems like such a simple and small project, it is the education of the villagers that will be the toughest part. I have to convince them that this project, even though it will tend to be more labor intensive, is actually worth the extra effort. If you've kept up with this blog, you'll remember I wrote about the experimental Farmers' Field School. With compost, this is were I will finally be able to test out the theory/practice.

The other day we built a water containment cistern out in the garden from a mud brick form, chicken wire and mortar. Getting the mortar to stick to the chicken wire was the most difficult part and it took me a good 20 minutes to get the right wrist/arm motions down. Had I built a cistern in village without any prior experience, I would look like a complete jackass trying to toss mortar onto the frame. This is the best part of IST. The Peace Corps training staff has prepared a full schedule of programs to train us on. We are able to do all of the activities through a hands-on process in order to work out the kinks and learn how to create them successfully. Over the next few days there will be more training as well as developing a calendar for the next 3 months at site until the next IST. I haven't given my individual site calendar too much thought, but I have many ideas floating around in my head. I'll write it up later in the week when I have a more concrete idea.