Making mushrooms
This is a highly illustrated post.
1. Growing mushrooms starts with compost. Mixing the ingredients – the
waste bits from rice, corn, grasses, manioc. Plus some chalk to help
keep the mix from being too acidic.
5. Mushroom bags (all the ones in the foreground were prepared by me!! I hope I did it right)
6. Our two AIDER agents, in the doorway of the little house set aside for mushroom growing.
Dear students,
Thousand Oaks is very different from Mission Tove; electricity and running water are just a few of those differences! Because Togo is almost directly on the equator, we don't have much of a change in the times of sunrise and sunset like I was used to in Thousand Oaks. I can pretty much count on the sun rising and setting at 6am and 6pm respectively. This means that I have to make sure to do all my household chores between these hours as it's really frustrating to try to clean my room or cook dinner with only candles to light my way.
(I've attached a photo of me cooking by kerosene lamp).
One of the rooms in my house has a window that gets good afternoon sunshine, even right up until 6pm. I usually choose to settle in this room for reading and studying after I've returned from meetings or groups during the day. When I find myself starting to squint to read, I put the book down and set up a few candles on my various tables.
Usually I will cook dinner in the last half hour of sunlight - it's too dark to read by, but I can cut vegetables and stir pots without too much difficulty. Once the sun has fully sunk beneath the horizon, I go outside with my hand-crank flashlight (a flashlight that doesn't require batteries - just a frequent cranking motion) and close the wooden shutters for most of my windows. I have to leave a couple open to get enough air flowing to sleep peacefully. Even at 9pm, when I usually go to bed, I am often wearing a light nightgown and still sweating in the constant warmth.
Between sunset and bedtime, I usually light four candles and work on various craft projects while listening to news programs on my short-wave radio (BBC News World Service has become my best English-speaking friend). Most people here do not have candle holders, they will simply dribble a little bit of wax onto the surface where they are placing the candle to help make it stick. I've learned to improvise candle holders so that they are more portable. I have an old ketchup bottle, several tuna fish cans, and a big can filled with sand as my candle holders. I'm still experimenting with making hanging candle lamps - in my first attempt, the candle melted the string that was holding up the can! Luckily I caught it before it fell, but I'm being much more careful now.
One of the interesting things about living without electricity in Togo is that it can be much less frustrating than living with electricity.
This is because the electricity lines are pretty unreliable, so one can get really used to having electricity and suddenly when the lines are cut, your world tumbles into darkness and your mood goes with it.
As far as running water goes... I really do miss that. I collect my rain from a cistern that's just outside my house. The water in the cistern comes from the rains (I have a drainpipe runoff that goes directly into the cistern). This means, though, that in the dry season - from November to April - it will almost never rain and the cistern will quickly empty. Once the cistern is empty I will have to hire young men and women from the village to walk the mile to the river to collect water for me. The huge jugs will be carefully filled and then lifted to be carried back to my house on their heads!
Not having easy access to running water has made me really careful about my water use. I use the runoff from my bucket baths (fill a bucket with water and use a large cup to pour the water over yourself to get clean) to flush my toilet and water my plants.
Well, that was a long answer, I hope you found it interesting.
Thanks for your question!
I bought a chicken!!!
I'm going to call her Arabella and feed her lovely worms and corn and she will give me yummy eggs.
Current reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark
Wednesday: Went to school, reminded 1eres about peer educator meeting, had brief conversations with other profs and worked on my vocab list from the book in French I'm currently reading. I really need to start putting the lists in the bathroom where I'll work on them.
Went back to mushroom project, but nothing much was happening till the afternoon. Went to atelier, played with an adorable baby called Cherita, agreed to teach how to gift wrap on Friday and showed the beginning of my knitting project (knitting strips of plastic bags to form bigger things).
At 15H I had the peer educators group at the lycee. It started 15 mins late because I was waiting for more people to show up. In the end, I had 8 eleves. We did jeu de l'epidemie (a game where we explore how quickly HIV can spread in a community), some True or False questions and then worked on the skits for the ABC's prevention - Abstinence, Bonne Fidelite, Condom, and Depistage (getting tested). The eleves had a lot of fun acting out the skits – we did each skit 4 times in total, with different people in different parts.
I promised we would do condom demonstrations next time, I might also have them do the skits with gender roles reversed – could be interesting to see how they do.
We spent considerable time talking about how an HIV-positive mother can pass the virus to her baby, etc. It got pretty technical, going into the fact that tests measure presence of antibodies rather than the actual virus and therefore all babies born to HIV+ mothers appear to have the virus themselves simply because they have the mother's antibodies. It might be worth doing a couple activities to seriously address the scientific specifics of VIH – not for a general sensibilisation – but to help the mature peer educators better understand in-depth questions.
Stopped by the marche on my way home, grabbed bread, biscuits, tomatoes, a mug with a lid. The soja vendors still hadn't arrived when I was ready to leave, so no soja for me today. I've heard that beans are going to become scarce once we hit the dry season, so I'm going to try to stock up. Important to keep protein levels up.
Saturday: Made gari with two apprentice friends then biked to Tsevie for post visit party. It took about an hour and a half. The road goes from the carrefour in Kovie (before the marche). The road goes past all the rice fields – they were very pretty, but I didn't take a picture with my digital camera because I didn't want to make myself any more a target for theft than I already was. To get across the bridge that fell apart it costs 500CFA. Half the bridge fell – and it's a huge bridge.
They put big logs across it to get people across and there are several men who hang out collecting the fee and bringing peoples' bikes and motos across.
The way to Tsevie is quite direct – the path comes out at Davie and I had to take a left and go up the National Route for about 10 minutes before getting to L and I's house.
Sunday: Headed back home at about 4. I should have left earlier – it was cool, but I was always either biking straight into the setting sun or in a shadow dark enough to make me worried about the condition of the road I couldn't see. In general the road's quite bad, sandy and rocky, but what can you do? It's Togo!
Monday: Went to school – teachers spent most of the morning adjusting the emploi de temps so they could have the days off "journee pedagogique" that they each wanted.
Worked on filling up my compost heap – water from shower, dead leaves from everywhere – I collect in a big plastic bucket and then pour them into the hole. It's going to take me a while to fill up the hole, so I've decided to go little by little, but try to add at least one bucketful every day.
Thought it was going to rain, but it didn't so had a meeting with Syncoutat (if it's raining, the meeting doesn't happen, as the meeting place is outside). Very glad to see how well they remembered and understood the first half of the Aminata story – from Feasibility Study book for Third World Women. Really need to go through and fix the translation. It could be stated much more simply, I found myself changing the words as I went along to help with comprehension.
Next week I'll work with the patrons- I figured a needs assessment/action plan from PACA, but I'd also like to take a look at the exercises in the Marketing book.
Saw the ICAT agent at the marche, he invited me to see his groupement de femmes learning how to grow mushrooms Tuesday morning.
2. The mixed compost goes into a huge vat to be warmed to help the compost start decomposing quickly.
3. After sitting well-covered for a day or two, the compost is packed tightly into black plastic bags, with a layer of mushroom spores laid in carefully.
4. Yummy spores.
