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.