Phew, the heat is really starting to kick in! Not sure whether or not my watch’s thermometer is trustworthy or not, but if it is the temperatures have been getting as high as 105 F in the early afternoon. The harmattan winds are still lingering but they’re sporadic and hot instead of constant and cool. On my bike ride today I was once again confronted by the now moderate winds and I’ve even seen a handful of strong funnel clouds sweeping by at times. Just the other day one came by my house without any warning. While it had been perfectly calm minutes before the cloud swept right through my terrace in a quick flurry and sent two loose papers flying high into the air and carried out of site in seconds by the unusually warm gusts of the cloud. I didn’t even bother looking for the papers because they were long gone.
As I understand it, things will only continue to heat up during the next month. The heat peaks here in mid-March as the sun chases the harmattan winds away until next November. For now I have to set my sights on the promise of the spring rains, which will come around the end of April and signal the end of the heat. Nonetheless, although I may take back this statement in a couple weeks, I will say that the heat is not as intolerable as I once imagined . It’s amazing how one’s body can adapt to such a change in climate. I am sure that 5 months ago I would be near miserable in the midday heat with no air-conditioning. I’m finding that the key is to leave all of the physical work one may do to the morning and evenings and then find a book or some friends, some shade and plenty of water while you wait out the high sun. Nobody knows this better than my dog who generally sleeps during the day but is spunky as ever in the morning and evenings.
From a couple of letters that I’ve received from home it seams that people are pretty curious about some of the work I’m involved in here. It’s tough to wrap everything up all at once, but I’ll try and dip into it a bit here.
As a general rule, each volunteer that is sent out by the Peace Corps results from a specific demand of a community. In my case, it was an association of gardeners who work on reforestation who wanted the help of a volunteer. So, if I was going to try and sum up neat and simple my work here you might say that I’m in the business of reforestation since my priorities at this point rest with the association (whose name, if translated from Moba, means “the shade is good”). As of now the brunt of my work is with them. When I was doing all my biking in the first weeks at post it was to help with the construction of fences for 4 separate hectares of land they reforested and now needed to protect from grazing animals. Now we’re switching our focus on planning for formations on reforestation in neighboring villages and planning for a botanical garden they hope start while I’m here. The idea is to set up a botanical garden (I might say botanical garden/forest) that has a collection of all of the region’s disappearing tree species. But more about that as it develops!
Beyond the association, I also have a responsibility to my village community as well and thus try and respond to other issues with any ideas I may have so long as the interest is sincere and somewhat widespread. As a modest example, yesterday I led a composting session.
Folks in my village, and most of Togo for that matter, face the ever compounding problem of soil degradation. Most people harvest the same fields every year. When they harvest the crop and then burn everything else in brush fires, each year the soil is left a little worse than it was before. The common solution is nothing more than the application of chemical fertilizers. These are expensive for them, have uncertain health effects and do little to restore soil quality. Composting is a modest way to improve their soil and thus their crops, with no inputs beyond labor and recycled farm matter. A handful of farmers in my village had heard about composting and wanted to learn more. So yesterday morning we got a group of about 11 men and 5 women together to demonstrate a compost construction. Again, just a modest gathering, but hopefully something that will spark community interest in compost as a way of improving their crops, reducing waste, improving the struggling soil and ending brush fires.
On that note I tried taking some photos of a brush fire (unfortunately, they didn’t come out too well so I apologize for that! They burn at night making them hard to photograph but you can get a sense for how they light up the sky and cover huge areas) that was lit a couple days ago to give people some incite into the commonly talked about issue. Back home we are usually at least able to till crop residues back into the soil in preparing our gardens or fields. But when hoes and dabas (large hoes) are the only tools generally available for such a job, one can understand why tilling might not be appealing! Compost itself is fairly labor intensive on the large scale and so even if the technique is known or heard of, it may not be applied when one has the option to clear his field quickly with fire. So, the fairly common solution to the unsightly and impeding crop residues is burning.
Legitimately, the practice might not be so bad if there was more planning involved. Although burning does result in a loss of soil nutrients, ashes can add something back to the soil if they’re reabsorbed. In fact, the law does allow brush fires between November and December. This is when things can be burned with little chance of unwanted spread and leaves some time for vegetation to reestablish before the dry season. However, when brush fires are lit in the middle of February (like the one in my backyard the other day) they get out of control easily and any nutrients that might have been left in the ash are swept away with the breeze before the soil can take them up again in time for the next crop.
Fortunately, it does seem that general consensus is heading in disfavor of brush fires. Nonetheless, old habits die hard and the impact is still quite visible both by the bright burning night fires and the charred landscape that’s left the next day as well. Hopefully, little by little, simple alternatives such as composting can be popularized here to help things out.
Anyway, I went off more than usual but I hope it was interesting. I’ll get back on when I can!
Bonne Journée!
