I have wonderful news to report...my community garden is in full swing! Finally, after over 4 months of planning and continuous nudging of the men to continue to work, we have dug the water line, installed the chainlink fencing and have begun the vegetable pepiniere.
It was a long process to put up the fence. The garden has a perimeter of 140 meters. This may not sound large, but when a fence post (which requires buying 8 meter long fence posts and transporting to another town to be cut into 2 meter lengths with holes drilled in them for wire to be strung through) is put up every 1.5 meters and each post requires a hole of 30 cm x 30 cm x 30 cm (to be dug by hand) which then must be filled with rocks (dug with a pickaxe from a quarry which requires an hour-long donkey carriage ride to bring back) and covered with cement (which then must be watered for 3 days to harden), then the fencing unrolled and attached with 3 lines of wire (which must be threaded through the posts), and finally the bottom of the fencing buried under the dirt to prevent anything from getting in underneath (which requires stretching the fencing a lot since the holes were not drilled in the proper place so there is thus a gap between the fencing and the ground) - it's a lot of work. But, after many work days with the men during which I supervised the work, walking around and giving my opinion and trying to help with the manual labor as much as I can while listening to each man give his personal opinion on every detail, all that remains is the final step of burying the fence under the ground.
So last week, I finally mobilized all the women to take over the work in the garden. Yaa ko moom! (You own it!) The garden belongs to them (not to me, as I keep reminding them when they refer to it as Aida's garden), and they were all so eager to start working. We began by weeding the entire garden. It was a daunting task, but easily accomplished in about 2 hours with 60 women working hard. The next day, I told them all to bring manure, wood ash, and charcoal to prepare the vegetable nurseries. (Manure and charcoal add nutrients to the soil and wood ash keeps termites away - Senegalese termites eat everything, including living green plants.) Before they arrived, I had measured out 1 x 1 meter beds, so that 3 women would share one vegetable nursery. As they arrived, I taught them how to prepare the soil (a method called double digging). Women kept calling me over to check out their plots and give them advice. I was literally pulled by my shirt from plot to plot as I commented on whether it was deep enough. The ground was really hard, so the women added water to it to make digging easier. At one point, I turned around to find several women wading in their plots. They had added so much water that it looked like a mud pool. They were walking back and forth to mix the water into the dirt. I don't know how effective it was, but I almost fell off laughing. That was not what I had expected to find when I looked in that direction. As I watched and enjoyed the site (momentarily ignoring the tugs by other women to check out their plots), I saw one woman fall completely into the mud and get up laughing. They were all having a great time. And they're all so eager to continue to work. Every day, they excitedly ask me when we're going to do the next step. We've planted the nurseries (onions, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, hot peppers, green peppers, parsley, eggplant, and bitter tomato), and they dutifully arrive every morning and night to water. The moment I began to measure out the larger beds (for transplanting the vegetables and directly planting okra, turnip, cucumber, and carrot), women began to arrive wanting to help out. They had never used a tape measure before (that was a man's job), but they were eager to learn when I offered for them to take over. They were excited that their alphabetization classes they'd had several years before had paid off - they could read the numbers to measure out the width of the beds. And I even got them to start teaching other women how to do it. That night, we worked until dark to measure half of the beds (each bed is 10 m x 1 m). The following day, I had work in another village. When I returned at night, I saw the garden full of women who were already beginning to remove the topsoil from their beds and water them so that the following day, they could add the soil amendments to it. All the beds had been measured out (a total of 52 beds with 3 women responsible for 2 beds). They worked until after dark this time - my host mom didn't return to the house until 9 pm! These women are hard-working and very eager. They can't stop talking about all the vegetables that they will grow and how hard they will care for the garden. I'm so lucky to be able to help them achieve this!
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