One year at site

It has been one year since I came to my community, and two months since my last posting. An awful lot has happened since then.

We created a health committee in February with the purpose of managing the finances and supplies of our village's health hut. Since then we have had one meeting, with another scheduled for tomorrow. Ultimately I want the committee to have regular meetings and develop a strategy to take care of the hut's finances, including maintaining a reserve of funds, and running a slight profit to be able to pay for electricity and running water in the hut. While I had hoped that we would have such a strategy in place before the rainy season, at this point I am not confident that it will happen. However, people are talking to each other and the ball is rolling.

I also created a tree nursery of about 1000 trees in my village. It took me about a week to prepare the soil prior to planting the seeds. I will say that my respect for our agroforestry volunteers skyrocketed during that week. A typical day would have me getting up at about sunrise, taking a laundry basin to the health hut and filling it up with sifted sand (about 40L). I would do this twice so that I would have 80 liters of sand, and then go to a compound about 200 meters away where there was cow manure. I would sift the cow manure, carry it to the health hut, and mix it with the sifted sand. Now given that it gets pretty hot here during the middle of the day, I would stop working at about 11-11:30 and rest for a while before returning at about 4. I would finally finish up around sunset (~7:00). At the end of the day, my body felt like I had been in a fight and gotten my ass kicked. After a couple of days of this, I got a few kids to help me and the work went by a lot faster. The last day, when the soil was prepared, we filled plastic tree sacks with the soil and arranged them in a little enclosure in the health hut compound. Finally we planted the seeds- the nursery contains about 300 pigeon peas, 300 Leucaena (a Nitrogen-Fixing Tree), 100 Moringas (the Indian drumstick) in tree sacks and another ~100 in a seedbed, and about 140 papayas. Now it is just a question of taking care of the nursery until the trees are ready to outplant, probably sometime in August.

I have also been doing my baby-weighings and health lessons, though those have taken a backseat since I started the tree nursery and the health committee was created. I am also hoping to do a comprehensive survey in my district (of about 50 villages) of mosquito net usage and need with the hopes of conducting a mass distribution later this year or next year. Hopefully this'll be done in late June.

The hot season is with us in earnest, though of late it has been rather cool at nighttime in the village. Perhaps the effects of climate change...?

Take care of yourselves and enjoy the springtime stateside.