Ndaye-Ndaye
We recently returned from a small village called Ndaye-Ndaye in the area of Ngoy. The village had no electricity or running water. Their daily activities surrounded the production and processing of millet, and pulling water from wells. The lack of water left us with no way to escape the 100-degree heat other than to find a shady spot in which to nap. There were a few gas refrigerators but their owners had no money to buy the gas for them. The people of the village were, as always, welcoming and very generous. Though they eat nothing but various forms of millet for meals (couscous for breakfast, “lack” (millet porridge) for lunch, and couscous again for dinner) they have the ability to buy rice with their excess millet, and we were fed often and well. They also cultivate vegetables and black-eyed peas in the village which keeps their diets healthy and more varied than some other villages. There was some light in the village from battery powered flashlights and solar panel lamps (funded by a Spanish solar power company).
Unfortunately along with friendly people come bold scorpions and braying donkeys. We were relaxing one night when a group of children started yelling and running around pointing. In no time one of the braver kids had a sandal in hand to beat the invading translucent scorpion into the ground. It wasn’t very big, the size of the palm of my hand, but they villagers made sure that we knew that they were dangerous and should be killed on sight. We saw another a couple of days later, but none of us had the heart to kill it. We let it scuttle away.
Besides a tour of the village, which included visits to the private Catholic school, the public school, a sacred tree, and the medical clinic, we preoccupied ourselves learning about the process wherein a village becomes part of the eco-village network in Senegal. We worked with and discussed a diagram and grid that are used to grade a village on its level of sustainability. We found it an interesting process, but one that needed much work. Specifically, we found that the same sustainability criteria shouldn’t be the same even for two neighbouring villages. Different aspects of sustainability are more important in one area than another, but on the grading scale they are given the same values. Overall it was a wonderful three days. Ken and I learned how to make Senegalese tea, I started to learn how to do Senegalese wrestling (in preparation for an inevitable wrestling match during our last Mbam visit) and we had a fun night on the roof of one of the houses making tea and taking about our time so far.
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A cube of crushed cans
Kids pounding millet
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