Site Visit

Hello, hello, glad to be back on the computer. Well this last week has been really fun, all of us trainees went to visit our sites and I must say, my site is off the chain. My host family is great, very big family though, my father has 10+ children. Many of them have moved out but he still has 6 living at home. Oh, and I probably have one of the best cooks in The Gambia, my host mother/sisters can cook like no body's business. Everything I've eaten has been amazing. Even Xadi (my language teacher) a native to The Gambia testified that it was some of the best domodah (a local rice dish with peanut sauce) she has ever eaten.

My house at site is a little small, even smaller than my house at Sare Samba (where I lived for training). It will work though, I've measured it out and I should have enough room for a bed, desk, chair, book shelf, and a trunk. The dimensions of the house are 12x12ft. Still, there is no running water, electricity or indoor plumbing. I have a thatched roof which I am gladly accepting, the tin roofed houses get very, very hot. The well is really close to my house so getting water isn't a problem. The water table is really high in my area so once I start pumping I get water, unlike at Sare Samba where they have a 200 ft. deep well, you can pump for 5 minutes without getting a single drop of water.

I have a lot of plans for my village but first I'll just talk about what I've done so far. My backyard is great, I wasn't expecting much but it turns out I have 5 papaya trees, 5 banana trees, some peppers and some other trees growing here and there. The boys in my compound water them every morning and I do the watering at night. The backyard had a big rut running through it caused by the rains during the rainy season, so I did some landscaping and fixed that and created some sunken beds for the plants and fruit trees back there. There was a bunch of poly pots that weren't being used as well, roughly 200, that were filled with good soil so I emptied those out and am saving the dirt for when dig my garden beds.

I have a lot of room for a garden so I plan on planting tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, pigeon pea, grapes (if I can find them), herbs and a bunch of other stuff. Eventually I'd like to extend the garden further back and plant a live fence and fruit trees. Time will tell, we will see how it goes with my first garden.

My host farther is a really hard worker and already has a Cashew orchard and I am proposing bee keeping to him which he really would like to do. His orchard is in a really good location next to a stream so I want to eventually have intensive bee keeping at his orchard and on his other lands. Hopefully other villagers will want this as well. Selling honey is very profitable so this will ring a bell for a lot of people. Another lady I talked to was interested in poultry raising. It happens that there is a lot of programs for that sort of thing in The Gambia so I definitely want to help her in acquiring funds and getting her business off the ground. She has raised poultry before and made a profit. With that money she had to build a house instead of buying more chickens, which is why she couldn't continue raising them. The North Bank region is very deforested so I want to start a wood lot of some kind. This would serve multiple purposes such as a wind block, firewood, timber, and bee fodder. They have a broken pump that I want to help fix. I might have to write a small grant to get money for parts and all that but I think it should be relatively easy to do. PC has a lot of resources and acquiring funds, especially for small projects, doesn't sound like a big ordeal. Guess I'll find all this out in a few months.

Well I think that covers most everything for now. I can't wait to get working, there is just so much to do. I won't be posting for a few months so I hope you all enjoyed the blog so far. There will be a lot to write once I get back from site, so stay tuned. All in all things are good, take care everyone.