More Training

After a 2 month crash course in language followed by 3 months at site, its time again to return to the Thies Training Center for IST (in service training) to get down and dirty (literally) with the real technical work we’ll be doing in village.

--giddy happy dance--

"I feel like a bunch of spiders are going to come out and insneer my body” - Frank slicing open a found caterpillar cocoon.

Tree walk: Since I am in the best sector, Agroforestry, we got out of drooling in front of powerpoints all day and went to collect seeds. Over the span of a couple hours, we collected about 8 tree species. We exhausted all means of gathering seed pods, including crouching through thorny tangles of Acacia, whacking pods down to the ground and onto our heads with rakes, and most excitingly, climbing in the tree and shaking it vigorously (see above photo of Justin Ross).

We dont stop there. All 20 of us found too much enjoyment in mixing sand, manure, and water to fill baby tree sacks! Im going to have to accomplish the same task in villages, but with less people, coordination, and general understanding. People are definitely willing to work, the trick is getting the ball rolling.

We planted about 150 trees into the small plastic sacks to the left. Again, I'm hopefully going to extend about 500 trees to three different gardens and a Moringa miracle tree to each house in my village.
Training is going to put me out of village for about 2 weeks, which seems like such a stretch, but it has thankfully been useful at least 2/3 of the time.

We were able to map out a calendar, which might be most important for our Ag group because all of our work is dependent on the seasons. We have a small crunch between now and when the "rains come" in June or July (depending on the region) because the rainy season marks the beginning of tree outplanting! Im excited for all of my potential work and all of the obstacles that are going to come along.