Last month I hosted a CIEE study abroad college student in Pelel. Peace Corps has a partnership where we host CIEE students every semester for a few days to give them a taste of village life, and Senegal outside of Dakar. We did a group trip to Segou Waterfall and then broke up to go to our individual sites for the remainder of the week.
the group of us relaxing in a pool near the waterfall
I set up a Morenga (or Nebadye (from the English for Never Die), an extremely useful tree, with nutritious leaves, think spinach) tree planting session during my student’s visit. With the students, we planted nearly 100 trees in tree sacks, so when they’re ready in a few months during rainy season the students can each take one home and transplant it there. In addition we did a morenga intensive bed, where the trees are planted 10cm from each other in a 1x5m bed. After a few months of growing we’ll be able to harvest the leaves from those trees almost weekly and the women will use them to prepare leaf sauce. The people of my town know what morenga is and love the leaves, they know that they’re extremely nutritious, and they truly make the leaf sauce very tasty, the problem is, there’s really none of these trees in village (it’s not a native species). Hopefully after the students take these trees home, more families will be able to benefit from this useful tree.
photos of me actually doing work!
and again
Jake, the CIEE student who came to Pelel, helping out with the demo
Aside from getting to visit all the waterfalls again, having the visiting student meant I finally got some photos of me doing some work (I can’t trust the villagers with my camera, I tried, it’s too exciting and confusing for them to operate) thanks Jake!
