Unfortunately, many schools in Senegal do not have great teachers or the resources of this school. In the primary school in my village, there are four classes and two teachers; each teacher must teach two different grade levels within the one classroom. This means that the students are only engaged half of the time and sit idly the rest of the time. One of the teachers at this school (who doubles as the director) cares about his classes and really tries to get the students to understand. It's hard to teach because the Senegalese system is taught all in French, and the students only know Wolof. So the majority of the time, they do not understand what is being said and cannot answer the questions being asked. I know that some of the kids are very bright, but they just don't have the language skills to learn much. the other teacher is awful. He barely even looks at the students, doesn't know any of the students names even though he has taught the same kids for several years (he teaches more than one grade in one classroom), ignores students who clearly have no idea how to solve a math problem given, and is really not interested at all. And the school curriculum is set up so that everything is learned by repetition and rote learning which isn't very effective. There's a new curriculum that has recently been started based upon the American system of learning by doing, but the teachers don't have resources to make classes hands-on and don't understand the concept well since they didn't learn this way. Plus, most schools do not have enough (if any) textbooks for the students to learn, so they just copy notes and examples from the board and then learn by memorizing these statements or problems without having real applications or practice (or understanding the French words they've recorded).
Anyway, this one primary school is much better and larger than the one in my village. It has 2 classes per grade and covers 6 grades. The director has been very adamant about getting the garden started as soon as possible, and I have spent several afternoons each week at the school dedicated to this task. To begin, we had to construct a fence. We decided to use the school wall for 2 sides of the garden, so the fence would only cover about 50 meters. The teachers directed the students to dig the fence post holes (30 cm diameter and 30 cm deep). Kids are such hard workers. No one complained, no one argued, no one asked questions. They patiently learned what a diameter was and got to work. They cheerfully dug 21 holes all in one afternoon, trading off the tools so that everyone got a chance to work, and the older kids dutifully taking on more of the work when the younger ones got tired.
After that, we installed the fence poles. This involved bringing rocks to place around the poles and then placing cement at the top. Once again, the kids were invaluable workers. Then we rolled the chainlink fencing against the poles and attached wire through the poles to the fencing. This was an easy job for kids of all sizes and all strengths, and they were very happy to diligently connect the wire to the fencing for hours. With this all done, it was time to finally begin the gardening work.
The main teacher I am working with is fantastic. He explains everything clearly to the kids, doesn't yell at them, and instructs rather than dictates. The kids all look up to him and respond very positively. He also is a great gardener/farmer. I let him do most of the instructing and just added in a few times along the way. We double dug the bed (a great technique for enriching the subsoil and maintaing the topsoil), added in manure (as fertilizer), wood ash (to prevent termites), and charcoal (to enrich the soil), and watered intensely. Finally, after watering for a few days until the soil looked dark and rich rather than just sandy, we began the vegetable nursery. We planted onions, lettuce, eggplant, tomato, bitter tomato, hot pepper, green pepper, cabbage, and turnips. A vegetable nursery is a way to intensely seed a garden. When they grow larger, we will transplant the vegetables to a larger bed with larger spaces between each vegetable and interplanted with another type of vegetable to reduce pests. By planting in a vegetable nursery, we can increase yields and save space since only the plants that germinate will later be planted in the proper spacing. When we do transplant these vegetables, we will also direct seed carrots, cucumbers, okra, and mint. These other vegetables have a high germination rate and thus don't need to be started in a vegetable nursery. We began the nursery a week ago, so hopefully in the next 2 or 3 weeks, the vegetables will begin to be large enough to transplant (though some of the vegetables require longer time than that). In the meantime, the school will prepare more beds so that all will be ready for transplanting. Additionally, we will begin IPM (integrated pest management) - using natural pesticides made from neem leaves, hot peppers, mint leaves, and a bit of soap all diluted in water. This gets sprayed onto the plants. So hopefully the garden will be very successful. I know that the teachers are very devoted to it, and the students seem to be very interested in the work as well. After all, lejumes am na vitamin lu bare. (Vegetables have many vitamins.)
