Vortex Smortex and Monkeys Too

I don't understand all this talk about the polar vortex. I am enjoying weather in the 70's and 80's with gentle ocean breezes.  Surely you people are imagining things.  Last week we had our yearly retreat for the WFP.  We went to one of the local hotels in Senegambia and had 3 days of meetings and food.  It was tough but we managed to get through it.

Here are some pictures of the M&E (Monitoring and Evaluation) team during one of our sub-meetings.
As you can see the circumstances were pretty rugged.  I don't know how we dealt with it

Many of the team members in the picture are stationed up country to do field monitoring for post emergency food supplementation. They are providing food to pregnant and nursing mothers, identifying children who are severely malnourished and referring them for hospitalization, and identifying moderately malnourished children and providing them with food to take home. If a children is moderately malnourished they provide them with Super Cereal Plus. It contains maize (58 percent), de-hulled soya beans (20 percent), dried skimmed MILK POWDER (8 percent), sugar (10 percent), vegetable oil, and vitamin & mineral premix. If you notice the 10 percent sugar content, it is to make it taste good.  Many of the malnourished children no longer have an appetite.  The sugar makes it more taste tempting to the child. The picture below of some children who are not in either of the malnourished categories but are providing good evidence that Supercereal Plus tastes good.  A bag of Supercereal Plus had broken and they are licking up the remains on the table.

Recently Rustica Carlos send me a birthday card telling me to celebrate my birthday like a monkey but stop short of throwing my caca around.  It struck a familiar chord.  At the same meeting we had a coffee break outdoors when one of my co-workers felt something like rain.  He looked up to see a monkey had urinated on him from a tree above.  Is that close enough, Rustica?  Needless to say he got a new plate of food.  I took several pictures of the monkeys -- they were pretty big. They call them red monkeys here but I do not know the scientific name.You can see a few of  them below:

A monkey family:

Thank goodness they did not celebrate in the way that Rustica suggested that I avoid.

Crocodiles!

Yesterday was New Years Day and I had the day off so I decided to spend the day with a friend and visit the local tourist attraction, Katchakally Sacred Pools, home of crocodiles, lots of them. While wending our way to the pools we passed a tree that I have seen frequently in The Gambia called the Cotton Tree.  It grows very tall and has a very interesting trunk structure at the ground level. I am standing in the middle of a couple of roots (trunk parts??)

Here is another view from another side of the same tree (without the beautiful model posing):

But I promised you crocodiles and you shall receive them.  When we entered the crocodile area we got a guide who works for tips.  He informed us that the crocodiles were pretty safe because they feed them lots of fish before the park opens so that they are not hungry.  The first thing we could do is touch one of the crocs known to be tolerant of such things. Trust me these guys did not move.  Here I am patting the croc:

I don't know if you can see it but the croc has a greenish cast that looks like it is algae but it apparently is tiny plants that will become water lillies.  You can see there is another croc right behind me who was totally unimpressed with my presence. No I was not sitting on his head. I do not think that would have been recommended behavior.

The picture below is of our guide who tolds us all about the crocs and the sacred pools. Apparently before it became a tourist attraction the pools were considered sacred to help women who wanted to have a baby. They ,merely had to bathe in the pools.  Hopefully there were not as many crocs then.  I doubt that there were.  Our guide said that they feed the crocs fish every morning so they are fat and happy when the tourists come.  They control the numbers of them by taking eggs out of the nests.  I don't think that I would volunteer for that duty, thank you very much.

As we walked around we saw crocs of all sizes sunning themselves in the morning sun. I have no idea how many there were, but there were a lot.

If I were with you all I would sing you the song "Never Smile at a Crocodile" -- Patti I know this breaks your heart to miss it. But I would give you two examples of smiling crocodiles and I think you can see why you should not hang around smiling at them.

Note in the big smile below that the crocodiles have no tongues. So I guess they can't apologize for biting you.  The other interesting tidbit I learned from the guide is that crocodiles have their mouths open to cool off, kind of like dogs, but I could not hear him panting.

We also some some crocs who made it past the egg culling stage.  There are at least 3 different sized small ones in the picture belo

Then for an extra added bonus, I thought I would throw in a few pictures from the little museum they had with the pools. The first is a picture of the original, more up country version of the Kankurang. I have included pictures in other entries but they were shaggy red guys.  This is more the original version which was made of tree bark.

The next one I am not really sure what it is but I don't think I would like to meet him.  I don't think Gambians were ever into shrunken heads.

The final museum picture is of a marimba like instrument.  Palm fronds and gourds can make music too.

And then lest you forget that this was titled Crocodiles!, my friend and I went to the restaurant that had the Beware crocodile sign.  The resident crocodile actually graced us with his presence. You will probably have to double click to get the larger view, but he is actually in there swimming. That is not a log, it is a crocodile right next to where we were enjoying lunch. Not as big as the big ones we saw at Katchakally, but I would say 5 feet long. We did not try to pet this one.

School Improvement Grants

Gambian schools were recently  given money to use as a school improvement grant.  I just thought you might be interested in seeing what this school prioritized for its grant.  I like the improvement of garden one. The Nat Results are the standardized testing at the end of the year.  The results are usually not very good. When they say renovation of the toilet, we are talking outdoor pit latrine.

Being a new daddy in The Gambia

The young man in the middle of the picture below is Ousman Bojang, a WFP employee in the North Bank region.  Ousman is a smart young man I think will go places.  He is also a new father.  I met his wife shortly after he was hired and when Ousman and I went on a school feeding trek together. At that point his wife was not even pregnant.  But shortly after that he got the good news that he would be a dad.  His was not an arranged marriage, they had met in senior secondary school and fallen in love. She went with him to his new duty station in North Bank.  When we had the training of trainers he said she was getting close to delivery so when I arrived in North Bank for cluster trainings I asked him how she was.  He said she was in Basse (way up country) with her family.  Apparently it is traditional for the woman to go home for her first delivery. We had finished one day of training when she had the baby.  She called and told him she was on her way to the hospital and 30 minutes later he was the new father of a boy.  He looked very happy but there was absolutely no thought on his part of not participating in the school garden training. He finished training on Wednesday, then finished up paper work on Thursday and started his paternal leave on Friday.  So send some special thoughts out to Ibrima Bojang who has joined the WFP family.

Teacher Housing -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The education system in The Gambia is national.  Teachers can be posted anywhere around the country with housing usually included as part of the job. Some of the schools are near main roads and others are much farther in the bush. I recently went to two different schools in the Central River Region and saw what the disparity in housing can be like. The first school was about a 25 minute ride from the main road over bumpy dirt roads. The head teacher at the school was new and wanted to bring the state of the teacher housing to my attention in hopes that I could bring it to the attention of the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education. Imagine being a new head teacher at a school and arriving to find that the head's housing looked like this:

He has to take money out of his limited salary to rent a room in the village.

The picture below is of the Deputy head's house which is obviously better than the head's home but still leaks heavily in the rainy season.

Now contrast this with the teacher housing in Illiasa. Granted it is not the Ritz but Iliasa is a few minutes from the main road and this housing is so much better than the housing for the village that was far from the road. The goats are just an added benefit.

Fashions in School Garden Training

Here are a few pictures that caught my fancy.  Below are a couple of pictures of Fula women.  Fulas like to wear jewelry as evidenced by the multiple piercings on these ladies.

Real men do wear lace.  This is the first picture I have taken of a man in lace but I have seen it all over the country, including the WFP.  This outfit is a long shirt over a pair of matching lace trousers.

It also tickled me that he was in a warm classroom but is wearing a knit stocking hat and also was not the only man in the classroom who was wearing a knit hat.

School Garden Training Finally Happens--

I have been out of touch for awhile because I have been buried in planning for School Garden Training.  But Round 1 is completed and I have lived to tell the tale, though at times I was in doubt that I would.  I had been left a great document by my predecessor that had all the information on how to plan school garden training.  So while the national head of programme was on a month's leave I proceeded to follow the document and got everything all planned. On her return she completely changed everything about how the training would proceed and upped the number of schools that would be trained.  Needless to say this raised havoc with the budget.  But eventually by tweaking here and there we finally were within the confines of the overall project budget.

Training was a two part process.  We are doing garden training in two regions so we first conducted a Training of Trainers (TOT) at the regional headquarters in each of the two regions.  For this training we brought in people from the national level to act as trainers. We had experts in setting up  and planning a garden, nutrition, and horticulture, who were able to cram what had been a two day program into a one day program.  We invited cluster monitors,  agricultural extension agents, school feeding focal points and garden masters to the training.  The Gambian government is in charge of all the schools in the country, which is divided into six regions for education.  Within the regions the schools are further divided into clusters.  The cluster monitor is stationed within the cluster and provided with a motorcycle so that he can visit all of the schools within his cluster.  How often they visit varies greatly with the cluster monitor.  School Feeding Focal Points are government employees that are responsible for school feeding and school agricultural matters for the region.  Agriculture extension agents  are employed by the Department of Agriculture but can be a real help in the school gardens if they can be encouraged to visit. Since the TOT was done at the regional headquarters we were a little more plugged in as the pictures show. WFP paid for gas to run a generator so that we could have uninterrupted power during the training. 

Below is a picture of Gibril Barry (hand up at the head table), a pixie of a man, with unending passion about what he is doing. Unfortunately his passion also makes him hard to shut up some times but I figured it was worth putting a picture of him in mid lecture since he was a large part of both trainings.  I am sitting next to him wishing he would be quiet and let the instructor get on with his own presentation.  The woman sitting in front of the door is our WFP nutritionist, a woman who WFP keeps extremely busy.

The gentleman from the Horticulture Department was very good in his demonstrations of composting and organic pesticides.  The picture below was a demonstration of the quick 
composting method. The stick is used as a thermometer.  If you pull it out and it is no longer hot then the process is complete and the compost is ready to use.  We did not use the amount of materials that were required for a real pile but the techniques were demonstrated. People seemed to be very interested in his demonstrations.

After we completed the training of trainers in both regions, the next step was training at the cluster level.  This training was all done at the school that was the cluster headquarters. We invited the Food Management Committee chair, a Mothers Club member, and any garden masters who had not been trained in the Training of Trainers. We are trying to encourage community involvement so that the garden can become a year round enterprise and provide to the school food bowl every term.

Unfortunately I originally set out for this training on Sunday when the car in which we were riding would only reach a top speed of 35 to 40 KPH (a blazing speed of 24.8548 mph). Luckily one of the people in the car told him to turn around because we would not be able to get to the places we needed to be at that kind of speed.  WFP was short vehicles because a food distribution was going on and most of the vehicles and drivers were out in the field.  It was hairy for awhile figuring out what was to happen but we ended up getting up early the next morning with a different car that could move (120 KPM).  However since we left on Monday I got to the first training late and still had to repackage and divide up the seeds for the different schools in the 4 clusters in this region. The headmaster for the school and I were in his office bagging seeds for a long time but we were able to get them all done in time to pass the first set out.  We also gave every school a garden manual, books for record keeping, gardening equipment and chain link fencing so the community members were pretty happy.

One thing that I did not enjoy about the training was being keeper of the money.  Gambia runs on a cash basis.  Checks do exist and we get paid by a transfer to the bank but most day to day business is done with cash.   I have attached a picture below of the cash that I had to take with me to reimburse people for various things.

People coming for training, are given money for transportation and lodging. Most of them find someplace to stay for free, since friends and relatives are all over the country. We provided breakfast and lunch. If people are trainers they are paid at a higher rate as facilitators. This happens throughout the country for any type of training. Our government partners are always willing to come on a monitoring mission because of the DSA (daily subsistance allowance). The government pay is not very high so the chance to get more from DSA is always welcome.  My pile of money also paid the cooks, and for any required supplies, but the major part of it is DSA. 

So what my bags of money enabled was lots of participation in the cluster level.  People seemed very engaged and asked questions.  Below is a picture of a group exercise --
the people were supposed to look at the crops and determine whether they could be grown during the different growing seasons.

 The man below was my favorite instructor of all of the training I observed. He was the regional nutrition representative and he knew how to involve the class and make it interesting.  

He had people choose different foods and then moved them into the groups of the food pyramid based on what they chose Then he actually moved some of the people into a human food pyramid so that they could see the proportions of what you should eat in a very visible way.

I included the picture of the woman below just because I liked her interest and her face.

We still have 2 more rounds to go.  Altogether we are training people from 156 schools in the two regions.  I truly hope that we will get the community involvement that we need.  I have seen too many gardens that were eaten up by animals during a break. If the community is invested in the garden that will not happen.

Last but not least is a message from our sponsor, the EU. The European Union is paying for all of the school garden training, equipment, etc. In return they like to have some visibility so we have created signs  that are posted at many of the schools.  Of course WFP gets some credit too.