School Feeding Trek Part 2

School feeding in The Gambia is provided by the World Food Programme of the United Nations and has been done in The Gambia for over 40 years. WFP provides rice, vegetable oil, iodized salt and split peas and hopefully it will be supplemented by food from the school garden or purchased from a fee that the students pay daily.  If a student cannot pay the fee, they usually will bring payment in kind such as firewood.  The two pictures below show a modern school kitchen.  These are constructed so that the cooks are exposed to the minimum amount of smoke.  The holes are made to fit the cooking pots and the three stoves all vent to a chimney.  There is no running water in the kitchens..  All of the water needs to be brought into the kitchen from the local water source.  As I said this is a modern kitchen and its conditions are the best.  Some of the older kitchens are not a place in which people should be cooking. 

The structure below is a classroom for an Early Childhood Development Center (aka preschool in the USA).
Some of the schools do have actual concrete classrooms for their ECDCs.  But I saw many of this type of classroom on my trek. During the dry season they would not be a problem, but I cannot imagine what they would be like in the rainy season.

Here is a picture inside the classroom.  As you can see they are set up like a classroom inside with desks and blackboards etc. It is hard to tell, but the student directly in front of the blackboard was leading the children in repetitions of the alphabet.  Rote memorization rules here.

We happened to arrive at one school at the beginning of the day.  The students line up have a morning routine they go through that includes singing of the Gambian national anthem.  This is true of all the schools though this is the only place I witnessed it.

The pictures below are from a school garden at one of the schools.  The most important factor for a school garden is a relatively close source of water but the second most important is a fence and a good one. None of the animals are penned during the daytime.  Cows, goats and sheep wander in the villages and the bush.  The goats are especially fond of school gardens.  They love to eat the tender green shoots. The fence below is what we call local fencing.  They gather branches/sticks from the bush and supplement with things like thorny branches.  The problem with this is that the branches dry out and get brittle so the local fences need constant maintenance. In some cases WFP has provided the wire fencing but the fence posts are provide by the village.  However one of the things WFP teaches in school garden training is the use of live fencing.  There are several different kinds of trees that can be used as fence posts.  One of them is Moringa which grows quickly and whose leaves are a nutritional powerhouse.  Others such as sisal can be used as the fence itself.

Below are two pictures of the garden inside this fence.  This school was one of the ones that was farther along with their garden. Many had not even begun their gardens at the time that we visited. As you can see there is nothing in the garden that is at the state that would enable it to supplement the food bowl.  Part of the this is because there is a long summer break for school in the rural areas so that the students can assist with farming.  Unless there is a very active community or student organization the garden is neglected until school starts up again so it is usually a mass of very tall weeds that grew very well during the rainy season. Most of the people in the community are actively involved in farming their own fields so keeping the school garden going is not high on the priority list.  For most farming means bending over with hand tools.  It is not an easy life.

As you can see, a lot of beds have been prepared in the garden.The different beds in the garden are assigned to different students who are in charge of watering, weeding, etc.  The concept is also that school gardens will also be worked into classrooms for practical application of knowledge -- for example how many plants should be planted in a bed  x metres by x metres.

My PCV counterpart in the WFP is finishing with the WFP in 3 weeks and I will be taking over her school garden work so I imagine I will be talking more about school gardens in the future.

This picture is a two pump water source.  I have seen small girls working together to move one of these pumps. They actually jumped up and down to get enough pressure on the handle to make it move.  There is usually just one pump at a location.  I took a picture of this because it said Gift of Saudi Arabia  in Arabic and English.  Unfortunately I did not get the sign in the picture.   It was alongside the highway (not the bush road) and I realized that I had seen several with the sign along the highway.  Now that is good PR. There other types of water sources that I will probably document in the future.  Aren't you excited?