Earth Day

For Earth Day, Wednesday April 22, 2009, I decided to be bold. Well, I decided to be busy, and hoped that things would work out in a positive way. Thats kinda like bold, for me, I guess.

Anyway, so I had a three-pronged aproach. Ok, maybe it was a two pronged aproach and involved three things that were in many ways interconected. Well on the actual day we only did two of those things and I did something else unrelated on top of that and later in the week we did the third thing. Well, let me explain:

While my local school and its teachers has been a source of continual frustration with me, I have really wanted to do some good environmental activities with the club that I have there. Dubbed the 'school garden club', one would suppose that we would have a kicking school garden by now. Alas, this is not the case. The would be garden has been repeatedly trampled by herds of cattle and other beasts and the space behind the school thusly remains a hard packed wasteland with no protection from the dying and widly spaced live fence plants. In the past they have attempted to go all out, fix up the live fence as best they could and plant like mad before it all gets eaten. This has led to efficient garden destruction and no one in the village wants to take ownership of such a large and overwhelming mess.

My idea then has been to start small. Rather than going all out for an expensive fence and fancy garden in the midst of waning interest, I decided to just do a school tree nursury. The kids from the club could have a few tree sacks each, water them, plant what they want in them, take care of them, and when the time comes, they can out plant them in their own compounds or out in their family gardens or wherever they want. Eventually this could expand to be a garden, maybe in the fall, the kids could learn improved techniques like composting and as it expands, the teachers will use it for lessons, parents will look into it, the space will become valued and perhaps some will feel ownership towards it, kids will take what they learn out into the world, trees grow and children eat, everybody wins. That maybe pretty and ideal, but either way it could only lie further down the road.

The other big project I forsee is one involving trash management. My original idea for earth day was to do a village trash cleanup, focusing on the area of hazardous waste. Most everyones trash falls into three categories: There is all the organic stuff, the biodegradable food leftovers dirt and junk that folks want out of their houses. This gets thrown into a pile outside of compounds to turn into dirt or blow away in the wind or whatever, no problem. I will get back to that later. The rest is as you would expect, man made junk that does not decompose. Most of this is you usual plastic bags, shoes, plastic bottles, old clothes and fabric, frayed rope and candy wrappers. This stuff builds up slowly, its surprising how seldom a family will throw away something like that, but it builds up none the less, mixed into the piles of organic junk and sand and blows around in the wind and never goes away. Except that they do burn it. Unfortunately there really only seems three options that make any sense for the people in my village and in most of senegal. You can burn it, which is reasonably easy and quick, though a little messy, you can bury it, not very easy and not very feasable to do with any frequency, or you can just ignore it and move on, which is what most of the country does.

I have gone back and forth on what a trash management procedure could look like in my village. I dont like the idea or burying it, that just makes a lot of work that no one wants to do, no one will do after i leave and just leaves the probelm for someone to dig up later. I also do not care for burning it, that is simply poluting the ground and the air and then you have toxic ash blowing everywhere in the wind. But what else can we do. Taking advice from several other PCVs i decided to go halfway. I talked to a gathering of most of the women living near me and tolk them about the problem and we decided that we could dig a pit, maybe a meter deep, and put the trash in that to burn it. It is not the ideal, but i cant think of what is. The women seemed happy enough about it, even applauded me when i was done. I just hope it is used well.

The third type of trash and the most dangerous as I see it is what is left over, the broken glass, the sharp bits of rusty metal things and most of all, the low grade batteries that are widely used enough in my village that they can be found everywhere. There is no good option as what to do with any of these, there is really an amazing amount, even around the primary school where kids play soccer barefoot. I saw this as a top concern.

So at the start of the grand day of the earth, I headed out to the school to talk to the teachers and the students. I had purchased a little trash can and put a sign on it, showing that it was for hazardous stuff. My original idea was that this could be put in front of the school, or maybe i could get several of them around the village so that when any kid, or anyone, sees some glass or batteries or whatever, they can put it in the can. I could emty the can every once in a while and wrap the batteries in paper and bury them somewhere far from wells, gardens or compounds. Immediately after explaining my plan and the beauty of Earth day to the teachers, they informed me, after looking at the trash can as something trivial and quaint, a silly gift from the toubab, that it would be stolen if i left it infront of the school. I was so taken aback i didnt know what to say to that. The principle offered to keep it in his office and put it out on the steps durring school hours, they all thought this was reasonable, he took the can from me, told me they would explain it all to the students and i walked away confused.

Also that day I told a guy across the village i would pick a bunch of seeds with him that morning. I had discovered his crop of moringa trees the weekend before and they were loaded; LOADED with seed pods. I had already gone and picked a bunch, some 400 pods and a bunch more seeds. As each pods has an average of 15 seeds, this was a lot. That morning I went back and got nearly 700 more pods and many mny more seeds. Later that week i made a trip to dakar and dropped off the 10-20 thousand seeds to be given out to other volunteers, so cool.

Anyway, after that long ordeal, it was back to the school to prepare the area for the tree nursury. I also got the dirt and manure to fill sacks with so the afternoon activity could go smoothly. I also changed my mind, took my trash can back and told the principle that we would use it for a trash cleanup later. After lunch It was back to the school again and waiting for my club to show up to set up their tree sacks. While we waited, kids thought what i was doing was funny and seemed to wanna help so i told them about the dangerous trash pick up. This on the one hand, seems a little counter productive to me. You tell young kids what is dangerous, things they should not touch or play with, but then you ask them to go find it and pick it up. Anyway, it worked well. When told what to look for it is like the kids all of the sudden realized how dirty the ground really was. Like they had never seen all the trash before or knew what to make of it. I was amazed, still am amazed how much broken glass there is all around the school and my compound and the kids amaze me by finding and bringing more and more of it.

Then, even theough the club decided to generally snub me again (that can be a whole nother post), we did do a decent job filling the sacks with the children that were around. We picked up trash, made a tree nursury, it was a good earh day. But i was not done for the week.

On saturday, after I was shown and marked off a proper area for it, We started digging the burn pit. I thought it would take a day, but it lasted two and I spent two more aranging it better. Lots of random kids stopped by to help with that, my family, older kids, very young kids, some that threw more dirt back in the hole than got it out. It was fun, it wa very dirty, my hands feel awful and have more blisters than fingers, but i think it might work, if it doesnt collapse. For the same reason that we have to cement line our latrines, the pit may need to be cemented. My village sits on sand, that sand sits on a layer of harder packed sand, over sand that is ever harder packed. No dirt, no clay, sand sand and more sand. We will see i guess.

Anyhow, now I want to do a big neighborhood cleanup with my club, around the school and my compound this saturday morning. We can throw all we can into the hole, so far even the crazy wind we have hasnt blown any of it back out again, and then butn it there. I think that if people see its positive effect, this trash 'management system' of burn pits and separating dangerous stuff can be extended to other neighborhoods and areas in my village. As they sort out burn stuff from dangerous stuff the leftover pile they creat will in effect be a compost pile. This can be extended into thier gardens or fields and as I said we can demo this in the future school garden.

I think there is a lot of potential in this. I am excited as to what will happen either way. Oh my this a long post. There are lots of pictures, I put up some of them on my picture site, check it out.

Note: i have a bunch of back dated blog entries that are half finished that i will get to at some point and post, so look out!