Saving the Charlatan’s Trees

In country we publish a paper that we call "Farm to Market". In it, volunteers share their experiences in the agricultural domain to help facilitate cooperation and communication amongst ourselves, which is sometimes tough being posted all over the country. The following is what I wrote for the next edition and I figured I would share with people at home...



Ever wanted an excuse to chat with a charlatan or a marabou (a charlatan with a muslim twist)? Well I got it for ya. Start a botanical tree garden!

Deforestation in Togo is at its most severe in the Savannah region. But for an area that is famous for lacking trees, there is any amazing abundance of tree diversity. While the association I work with (Shade is Good) normally grows a variety of exotic trees in their nurseries (your average list of quick growing nitrogen fixers), they came to the realization that there is still a very real demand for native trees. And most of it is rooted in traditional medicine!

There’s no doubt modern medicine is replacing the work of charlatans, marabous or the family vieux (in moba the word we use is "chambah", but it all refers to a respected elder), but the reality is, traditional remedies are still highly sought. Oftentimes, these remedies are age old recipes made from the bark, roots, fruits and leaves of many different tree species. In fact, part of the reason the rare trees are disappearing isn’t just arbitrary cutting for firewood. Lots of the trees that are left are dying because people are constantly digging up their roots and scarring their bark to treat assorted ailments or work certain gris-gris (what you may consider voodoo or animism). Really, once it dawns on them, people are excited by the idea of being able to plant these trees in their own yard. Believe it, the demand is there! The question is, how do you go about meeting it?

Shade is Good, is responding in a unique way. They are in the process of creating a botanical garden made up of the region’s rarest trees, shrubs and vines. In one hectare they hope to gradually amass a dictionary of living trees and cultivate nurseries full of their saplings to make available to the community and generations to come. Although they’ve already succeeded in trials of at least 18 local species, the process will be ongoing and has required a lot of homework.

This is how we’ve gone about it so far:

1) We needed a list of the trees we wanted to focus on. Thus, we asked our native tree experts, Dr’s Charlatan, Vieux and Marabou! Just like that we got a list of the rarest and most highly sought after trees around. You’d be amazed by the size of the list you can generate from only a handful of local wise men. Be forewarned though, French and English with be of little use. This is local language time!
2) Once we knew the trees that were going to be our priority, we sought out the nearest known adult tree of each species. Finding and noting the location of existing trees is essential. With this information you can go out and scientifically identify your tree (try Arbres, Arbustres et Lianes du Sahel by Michael Arbonnier, he has versions in French and English) and more importantly find your seed source.
3) While finding our adult trees, we took pictures and sometimes samples of the fruits, leaves and bark of the trees, since these offer the most defining features of a tree that can help with identification (In my experience, the fruits have been the giveaways for ID. Leaves are second best and only sometimes do you need the bark/core color). Then if possible, we harvested the seeds to try in our nurseries. If mature seeds weren’t available, we determined (often by asking the nearest local) the month when we could come back to get them. Also, keep an eye out for species that are done by boture!
4) We identified as many trees as possible. By getting a scientific name, we open ourselves up to inter-regional or international cooperation. This could help us bring in certain species whose seeds are already too hard to find locally and in addition, it could help us attract visitors from afar to one day come visit us in hopes of finding a specific tree.
5) What seeds we did find, we distributed among our men, asking them to try growing them in their garden. This is how we came to get our current stock of 18 species.
6) Having gathered information on the harvest periods for each tree, we plugged the data into a calendar to further organize the search. Using this calendar of seed harvests, we send people out on a monthly basis to find certain seeds for trials. This way, we are able to try out all the species we want (not just the ones that give seeds in dry season for example) and with time, hopefully continue to add to our botanical garden!

So, if you want a dry season hobby (the best time for a tree nursery!) or just an excuse to probe the local charlatan, think about starting a botanical garden in your village!

Chez le Mécanicien

Hey all!

Let’s take a trip to the mechanic’s today, village style!

So I’ve already mentioned that in village, if you have a mode of transportation, most often it’s either your feet or a bike. And despite road conditions, we’re not talking about mountain bikes. We’re talking about single gear, often old, often twisted and often Chinese city bikes. The kinds with thin tires and no tread, a platform over the back tire (the bed) for your bigger loads and sometimes even a basket in front, convenient for transporting chickens or “la sauce” (as a side note, I always get a kick out of the fact that in general people refer to any kind of green vegetable as being “the sauce”!) . These are bikes abused to no end on all kinds of roads and paths leading into the Savannah bush villages. The elaborate network of dirt roads/paths are rocky, sandy, eroded and, right now, sometimes water logged. But the bikes manage to pull through it all more often than not. But what happens when the bikes finally do break down?

Usually, a trip to the mechanic's means you’ve exhausted all of your MacGyver-esque techniques. Most people are their own mechanic, but sometimes they just don’t have the tools or the broken part to do the trick. But believe me, if they can jerry rig it to avoid a fee, they will! I think the niftiest piece of work I’ve seen yet was how we once repaired a flat tire of someone while on the path. We had no patches to work with, but what we did have was a long rubber “caoutchouc”, our bungee cord, standard on all bikes. It’s what we use to strap things to our bikes. Without them we wouldn’t be able to manage to carry so much on our bikes, like 50 kilo sacks of fertilizer or bed frames! I’m amazed by how much a bike can carry if you really want it to! Anyway, after locating the hole by rotating the tube through a bucket of water, they pinched the spot of the whole, making a bit of an earflap, and then tied it off tightly with a thin strip of this caoutchouc. They pumped it up and it was ready to go. Sure it was an awkward looking thing that patched inner tube, but sure enough it took us all the way back to village and to the above pictured mechanic shop.

Now yes, there is a motorcycle mechanic in village for those who do have the chance to own a moto. But for the large majority who move around on bikes, this and one other stall next door suffice as our auto body shops. And just like our frustrations with mechanic shops at home with our cars, people here are subject to similar pains with their bikes. I’ll hear people moan about the money they have to spend or the wait they have to endure to get their bikes back on the trail and I can’t help but chuckle and think of how in a way, it’s just like home. Haha!

For those pictured here, fortunately it’s still early on market day and things haven’t yet filled up. But believe me, by noon that same day the lot will be chock full of upturned bikes waiting to be tended too. In that case, take a seat at a tchakba stand, grab a calabash and “patientez un peu pour le mécanicien”.