What happened this week?

It’s not been a particularly momentous week, but I must have been doing something since the last time I wrote, right?  Let me think.

I planted about a hundred moringa seeds—Moringa oleifera is a sturdy plant (it would like to be a tree, but doesn’t always get that far) that produces copious amounts of leaves that are high in protein and vitamin A—the perfect thing for this time of year, when the sweet potatoes in peoples’ garden are all dried up and not making leaves, and the cassava leaves aren’t growing as fast as they’re getting harvested (at least, this is what’s happening at my house)—so, we aren’t eating as much leaf sauce, and I miss it.  I planted the moringas with the pepiniere (tree nursery) group that Mr. Sacko runs (he’s the Eaux et Forets guy)—next, I want to plant some baobabs—their leaves are good for sauces too—but they do take a bit longer to get to harvestable size compared to moringa :)

 

I biked up to the irrigation dam at Dounkimanya with a group of volunteers—they swam, I checked out the spillway and the flow gates and the irrigation channels.  I love irrigation.  

And yesterday, I ate my very first Guinean mango—and yes, it was amazing… I am in love with mangoes.  Right now, they’re still pretty expensive, at 1,000 FG each (that’s seven mangoes for a dollar, just to make everyone in America jealous), but I hear that soon, the market will be flooded… and then the whole countryside will be flooded… there are mango trees EVERYWHERE.  My house has three.  I whisper words of encouragement to their little green fruits every day.  

Tierno Boubacar, my tailor, is still making slow progress on my latest outfit… I think it’s been a month now since I dropped off the fabric.  I would be more annoyed if I couldn’t see for myself the literal piles of work that he and his apprentices have in front of them: the shop is always full of raw cloth, mending, and adult-sized outfits waiting to be cut down or reshaped for kids to wear.  Still, I drop by each day to encourage him to move my outfit to the top of his work pile.  

What else has changed?  The soil is drier, the baby goats are bigger each week; the chickens have (mostly) been staying out of my vegetable garden, and the veggies are growing, but slowly.  I spent an entertaining morning burning plastic trash.  This is my life.