Its going to be hot! No, really. And its with those words I kicked off the months of April and May. Granted, I live in the Sahel desert so yea of course its hot. But than came hot season and it got hotter and hotter. I started off the month in good humor. I figured if I didn't complain about the heat, put it in a good light and joked about it, "You call this (115 degrees) hot? I'm freezing! Where's my jacket?!?!" I figured I could survive. Which I did, barely.
I kicked off hot season by going to Potato Festival in another volunteers village. Filled with dancing, music and a vibrant festive feeling, this event celebrates the potato harvest and manages to sell a significant portion of the harvest in one day. I somehow ended the day with a 25kg (55lbs) sack of potatoes balanced on my head. Needless to say, that is an excessive amount of potatoes and the couple who bought it, even after giving about 1/3 of it away, were eating potatoes for the next month.
Returning back to Djibo, I was planning on organizing a nutrition day to market and have a large sale of the enriched porridge flour. That hasn't happened because first we had to talk with the doctor responsible for my entire province. After a frustrating couple of weeks of not being able to find him, we finally got our meeting and while he was dynamic and enthusiastic, wanted the thoughts of 'other authorities' and so he took some of the flour to send to the Ministry of Health's National Laboratory to evaluate it's nutritional content. A preliminary analysis indicates that when used to complement breastfeeding in infants aged 6-10months, 80g of the flour would meet daily recommended values for calories and proteins. We await the official results but if we get the go ahead, the doctor would love to expand production significantly to get the product throughout the entire province. Despite not having produced the flour in a while, a lot of people have asked about it and where, and more importantly when, they will be able to by more. Success in marketing I guess.
But the hold in the enriched porridge flour encouraged me to finally diversify my activities, which I had been talking about doing for some time but hadn't gotten around to. While I'm a big fan of trying things out on a small scale and seeing how things go, it seems some of the projects I proposed were met with enthusiasm by overachievers, in a good way. One of these was introducing members of an already functioning weaving association to a technique weaving with used plastic bags. It is primarily designed to recycle the bags which litter the landscape but also lowers input cost (since littered plastic bags have no cost) and the woven material can be converted into a wide range of reusable bags and accessories. The women wove about 40' worth of fabric in week and now we are working to convert it into actual sell able products. I took a couple day trip to visit another weaving association who has been weaving with plastic bags for a longer period of time and has even arranged to sell some of their work in France and learned new and improved ways to cut the plastic bags so they don't leave small knots in the material. A day after I explained this new technique to the women, they had already started incorporating it. Who knows, maybe after all of this I will end up with a suit made from a woven plastic bags. Now that's style in the 21st century.
Also, in an effort to continue the wonderful availability of mangos throughout the year, I started doing some mango jam making again. I put together a training for other volunteers and organized a training for members of my host organization. I attempted a third training but was unsuccessful since the mango merchants weren't out in time. By all, it received a warm reception and its possible I will do a few more in the coming months.
I also started building mud stoves and will supplement this by introducing fuel briquettes, made from organic and other waste materials designed to cut down on the amount of deforestation caused by using wood for cooking fuel. My success teaching some women to build mud stoves was mildly sedated by the fact that I briefly fainted and fell into the mixture which contained 1/6 cow manure.
And all the while, I managed to do this in temperatures that daily exceeded 110 degrees, and often went above 120. I will never know what the hottest temperature was because my thermometer only goes to 120. Yet, the worst day wasn't because it was hot; it was a dust storm that blew in layering my 144sq/ft house with enough dust, it took me four hours to sweep out. I wasn't able to see more than a couple hundred feet as the entire world around me had turned a Mars-esque red. But, it was the first time in more than a month and a half I had seen a temperature of 95 degrees at 5pm.
Despite the heat, I still managed to do some interesting things and now that its 'cooled' off, I've seen my first rain and things are turning just a little greener, it should make it easier to live, work and play (200km bike ride anyone?) up in the Sahel. And this time around, I don't have to lie to myself that 115 or hotter is 'cold'.
