My first week back in Africa
Morogoro is hot. The streets are busy with activity of local life-people are always going somewhere, always selling something, always hanging out. Here I live by the rules of the streets, at the mercy of the local transportation and I feel like I am always on display. It is hard here, but it is also beautiful. The mountains that surround this town are large and strong, jutting upward into the African sky, with low spreading trees lining their ridges. The people are also beautiful and so colorful. They are stoic and confident.
My roommate is from Holland, and I couldn’t have been placed with a kinder person. She is motivated and smart, super organized and very clean. She works here as an English teacher and I have never met a volunteer so committed to her work. She is graceful in her Swahili and her English. She loves to cook and has amazing friends that send her special treats from Holland so that her pantry is stocked with Nutellas, jams, spreads, chocolate, spices, teas, and herbs. After living here over a year she is wise to the Tanzanian world.
Our house is fantastic, but even a bit too much. We live in a gated compound filled with jack fruit, passion, and orange trees. There is a swimming pool in the back yard, and I have my own bedroom and bathroom. Sandra has decorated the house with fabrics, candles, woven mats, houseplants and pictures. She works through VSO (Volunteer Services Oversees), an organization similar to our Peace Corps and they have given her a motor bike to use for the two years she is here. We have a modern kitchen, a living room and a dining area-it is all so nice.
Polly is also amazing. She is kind, beautiful and very smart. She heads up this whole organization, finding teachers and students, setting up volunteer work, etc. She has lived in Africa for 12 years and has a daughter named Martha who is almost four. Her husband, John, is a geologist. They live in Dar Es Salaam most of the time, which is about a 3 hour drive from here.
The school is the nicest school in Tanzania that I have ever been to. It is beautiful in color and design. They built it with natural lighting (skylights) giving us lots of natural light during class (see the pictures). The 27 SEGA students are funny and eager to learn. In the morning Sandra does aerobics with them, then they have math and English and in the late afternoon we work in the garden.
When I arrived I found they had planted beets, watermelon, and tomatoes in raised beds and large spaced out rows. The reddish soil is hard packed, dry and burnt. The veggies are growing, but I was surprised as to how they were taught by a local organic organization to plant them with such large spacing. Then I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Jensen who has changed everything in one short afternoon.
On Sunday we met with Peter, who graduated from UVM in the 80s and has lived in various countries in Africa since 2000. He was in the Peace Corps right after college and after returning to the states for further education, he always wanted to return to the Motherland to do more in agriculture. He now travels all over the continent training Peace Corps volunteers to use his Permagarden methods. His wife lives here as well working with and the ministry finding uses for the $3 milloin project for AIDs awareness, and his teenage daughters go to an international school where they go on field trips to Mt. Kilimanjaro and Ngorogoro Crater and scuba diving off of Zanzibar. This man has so much enthusiasm and joy for what he is doing you can’t help but feeling the same. Peter was who I needed. He has, in two days, taught me more about gardening in Tanzania then I ever thought I could learn.
We met up with Peter at a Teacher’s College where he had been training Peace Corp volunteers to create a small biointensive garden that could feed a family or two. His method concentrates on double digging in order to loosen the soil so that crops can have adequate root space (the soil here is very clayish and compacted), adding ingredients to the soil that are accessible to people, using fast growing and popular plant species, creating living fences that will function to keep intruders (ie chickens and goats) out and choosing a fence that can also be used as food (a low growing green called matembale and lemon grass), and only teaching using tools that are available to even the poorest person. He knows all the fast growing crops, such as mchicha-Tanzania’s spinach, we know it as amaranth or pig weed, pigeon peas, and of course, everyone’s favorite-maize! After showing us his garden he agreed to come by the school and meet the students and work with us in the gardens. So we dug a 4 meter by 1 meter bed once, turned around and dug it further, adding charcoal along the way (which will hold moisture and we can also add ashes and leucaena leaves), then we shaped the bed, then added more charcoal(crushed-free at the market leftover from larger charcoal for sale) ashes(leftover from cooking), and compost(which we can make ourselves), mixed it into the soil, smoothed and shaped the bed and then planted. We also do not plant in rows, but in triangles to maximize the space available. He has had great success with this method and I hope that we can too! All of the perennials were cuttings from another garden and the rest of the resources besides seeds and the jembe (the Tanzanian hoe, which is more like a shovel head mounted like a hoe) were free! All of took just 2 hours. It is an excellent way to teach people who have nothing how to grow food in small areas. You only have to double dig once and from then on you can either chop up the previous vegetable matter after harvest and plant right into the bed or redig just once to maintain the bed. The beds are permanent and are never to be walked on, just as our walkways are permanent and will never be planted in. He also plants papaya and cassava and a native tree, which is a legume, therefore a nitrogen fixer into the soil for erosion prevention, food and shade as well as bananas. He also loves to dig large holes in various spots in the garden called swales, which will catch and slow down water and then send it to channels in and around the garden beds so excess water is not lost during a rain storm. It was all very clever and motivating! I have worked in many gardens, but this is Tanzania’s answer to growing food! Here they are normally taught to dig shallow, plant far apart, to put many seeds into one hole, not to use companion plants, and not to use compost. Driving around now we see so many people out working in fields digging up the entire field only to plant a little of it due to large spacing and then they will do it all again in 3 months. Using his methods 2 people can establish beds and perennials in less than 2 days and have food to eat in less than 2 weeks. I was really impressed. He has visited so many sights and has made these amazing videos showing before and after shots of what can be accomplished. People here are obsessed with corn and when they saw they can quadruple their corn production on the same amount of land using his permagarden techniques they were finally convinced. It is hard to come here and try and teach new skills, especially as a white person. You must think like a Tanzanian and only use the tools and resources that a Tanzanian has or they simply will never even try.
So now, I go to the school early in the morning and help Frank, the guard and gardener, water all the plants. There is a section of the garden still that is spaced in large plots that take a long time to water, but we shall see what can be done about that. We also started a simple compost using soil, grass, dried grass, water and food scraps. The girls really enjoyed building the compost and they like to garden, which is great!
I haven’t even been here a week and the jetlag is still keeping me down. I have been here twice before yet I still have culture shock from the heat, the noise, the smells, the language, the marketplace…..and at the same time it feels like I have never left.
I hope you are all well and living life to its fullest. I miss you all and Vermont and Bran so much, but I know it is my home and I can return whenever I want. Please comment here on my blog or send me an email as I need your love and support.
Much much love,
Linz
