August 11: Whew! I did a lotta learnin’ this week. I took a boda boda trip around the entire four village sub-district - through the bush, across pond-sized puddles, down single track footpaths, through various families’ mud hut compounds, stopping periodically to pound the “wishwa” off maize kernels (see the picture of me with the stick?) and fetch brackish, unpotable (though widely consumed) water from a borehole - to see how and where people collect their water. The next day, I surveyed the thirteen FFS students about their own water-fetching, gardening, and irrigation practices. This process was important because I haven’t had a good estimate of the average size of a kitchen plot. Using the students’ responses, I can more appropriately size the irrigation system. I also confirmed a lot of things that before were just my own loosely informed assumptions. For instance:

(1) Fetching water is almost exclusively a woman’s task, with the occasional help of children.

(2) Women make the trip to fetch water at least 3 times a day, and up to 8 times. Each trip takes about 30 minutes (Or an hour. I'm not sure on this yet.).

(3) Since nearly everyone must pay for their water, and it is considered very expensive (about 2 cents for 20 liters), noone practices any form of irrigation, relying entirely on rain for crop watering. So during the dry season from January to April, there is no crop growth (and people get very hungry – many children die during these months).

(4) People do not plant crops in rows or according to any predictable method (making conventional drip irrigation a little tricky, because how can I know where to place the emitters, if I don’t know where you planted your crops?)

(5) Given such “messy” gardens, I can now make a final selection: flexible tubing will most definitely be preferable to rigid PVC.

(6) While people cannot afford to spend money on water for irrigation, their crop yields are not sufficient to feed their families. Consequently, they must spend a great deal more on vegetables – which could be grown in their own garden if they spent more on water to irrigate. This is a problem of poor resource allocation.

I’m sure there have been a few other important lessons this week, but the real accomplishment is that I can finally start buying the supplies for and then assembling said drip irrigation system. I can’t believe I’m actually going to do that part. I guess I kind of figured I wouldn’t quite make it to this point.

Other than that, I am really starting to miss Marco. But I am trying to keep this blog academic and respectably professional, so I guess I shouldn’t mention things like how I miss Marco, and can’t wait to move into our new apartment (which we haven't found yet), and I’d really love to have some coffee and an orange cranberry scone, and I constantly feel like my hands are filthy, and I forgot clippers, so my toenails are poking through my socks, and I have to handwash my clothes and so they are never completely clean, so I just stink all the time, both because of dirty clothes and because I am constantly covered in a thin layer of dirt with sweat, which of course, makes mud. But again, that’s not the point, and all these things are part of the experience, which, in fact, I am truly enjoying.

I included some pictures of myself and a few other things on boda bodas. I am continuously struck by how practical and adaptable Africans have had to be. The boda boda strategy is just one example. Africans have for centuries been told that “our way is better”, but in so many cases they don’t have the resources or the training to do it our way. I feel like the Western world has invaded Africa on so many fronts – the Americas during slavery, Europe during colonialism, and now Europe and the US in this post-colonial global economy, and yet Africans are never the ones to benefit. I mean, Africans are some of the world’s first farmers. It can’t possibly be the end of the story that they are today such terrible farmers, with such poor harvests, no irrigation techniques, and so little variety in their crops simply because they just don't have any good ideas. The truth is, from farming, to education, to family planning, to religion, and on and on, they have adopted Western techniques that for one reason or another are not sustainable here, and over time, they have lost the traditional knowledge of what does work. More on that later, but I need to put more time into how I express my ideas. It’s easy to blame White people for all the world’s evils, but there’s more to it than that. At any rate, I have felt guilty more than a few times here over all the Western world's bright ideas about what would work best here. Africa is the world’s laboratory, and most of the experiments haven’t worked.