The Agrinautica

July 2nd, 2014, Day 1 - I slowly drift to wakefulness, judging morning on the frequency and enthusiasm of the crowing of the village's roosters. Abdul's wife brings me an omelet and then I sip tea with Baro on the porch as the rain slowly peters and gradually beekeepers begin to gather. There has been no reference to a clock or particular time all morning, this is just the pace of life.

   We set up chairs under an awning and begin with introductions -- it seems of the 20 or so attendees, about 70% have "Mamadou" as a first name, ad about 60% have "Diallo" as either a first, middle or last name. We spend the first morning on introductions and planning for the next two weeks. We finish for the day around 1pm and I explore the countryside around the village -- just outside the low wall around the village its green countryside of grassy meadows and forest. A river runs nearby, where the locals do their washing. Goats wander the meadows beside the village, each with a stick tied to their neck such that it sticks out horizontally, thus making them unable to enter the village through the narrow gates (which are usually kept close anyway but clearly it must be worth this added precaution)
   When I'm in the village the children, who the first day only peered cautiously from afar and ran if spotted, now frequently work up the college to call out "bonjour" to me from a safe distance.
   There's a well with a big hand pump lever in the middle of the village, usually the early-teen children seem to get the duty of pumping the pump when water is needed. The house I've been lodged in has a "western style toilet" (thank god, I'm really not fond of the ole hole in the ground), but because there's no running water line of course, when it needs to be flushed some kids are sent off to pump the pump and bring back water, which makes one rather reluctant to use the toilet unless one quite needs to.

   This and every subsequent evening would be very much like the previous one, with us all trooping over to the local elder's house for evening prayer, and then Baro would slowly make tea over glowing coals. I find he is enthusiastically religious -- not in a boorish or dangerously unhinged way, but in that he seems to genuinely enjoy the strict regimen of ramadan and the wisdom of the ages passed down to him through his lifetime of religious observation seems to fill him with a zen-like stoicism.



July 3rd, Day 2 - After lunch I enthusiastically get my bee suit and equipment ready, because we're going to visit beehives! The trainees look at me with alarm as I come out in the coveralls, saying "there's been a misunderstanding, we're just going to look at the hives, not open them!"
   "But I've got the equipment, let's open them!" I say
   "But no one else brought their suits." ::sigh:: okay we'll go look at the outside of beehives.



July 4th, Day 3 - The batteries on all my electronic devices are nearly all out due to a lack of any electricity for several days now. We still manage to avoid actually doing any beekeeping -- though this is hardly unusual, a seeming institutional reluctance to get stuck into it seems to be a theme of all projects.
   The children are now brave enough to come talk to me, as best they can. I show them pictures from beekeeping magazines I brought. One of the children in particular, Mamadou de Boba seems to have adopted me, spending hours talking to me despite that I can't understand a word he says but the occasional "is that so!" in English seems to be enough encouragement for him.
   I'm told there's a Peace Corps volunteer in the area, as a matter of fact we're a bit further in the bush than where she's based, which, since Peace Corps volunteers are the very definition of being deployed way out bush way, to be further in than one of them really feels like something. Having been dropped from the Peace Corps in 2011, to learn I'm out here further than the nearest PC volunteer feels a bit like, well, I made it out here after all.
   Another peculiar thing is becoming apparent to me. They seem to think it's more desirable to eat indoors. Because houses are literally "home-made" from locally made bricks, the walls don't support large windows and there's never power so it often results in eating alone in the dark while I'd prefer to be out in the light and fresh air but especially with the language barriers its hard to swim upstream against their desire to do me honor by ushering me in to a dark dungeon to take my lunch.

July 5th, Day 4 - we finally get a generator hooked up, which is barely powerful enough to charge some things a bit. AND we finally get to do some beekeeping! The hives as it happens are full of honey and we find we haven't brought out enough buckets to harvest honey into (with topbar hives honey is harvested by cutting it off the topbars into buckets).
   After lunch Mamadou de Boba and I wander around outside the village. I try to instill in him an interest in insects but with a complete language barrier he's prone to interpret me pointing out a cool insect on the ground as an invitation to try to smash it.
   In the evening Baro gets his hands on an avocado. He meticulously peels it almost as if it's some kind of ritual, culminating in removing the big spherical pit, holding it up and admiring it and commenting on where he will plant it, and then reverently eating the soft green flesh. He evidently found a source of avocados because every day he would perform this avocado ritual, including the admiring of the pit and commentary of plans involving it.

July 6th, Day 5 - Baro and I are sitting on the porch in the afternoon when a delegation of three men from the village approach us in a strangely formal manner. Uhoh, am I in trouble for something? Baro smiles knowingly before they even begin to speak.
   "The people of the village want to honor you with a gift of two roosters" he translates "... what do you want to do with them?"
   I'm usually a big softy when it comes to animals but I can't fathom what else I could possibly do with roosters than eat them, so I say "eat them I guess?"
   There's some interchange in the local language -- was this the wrong answer? Should I have had them set free like the pardoned turkeys? their response comes back to me "okay we'll cook the first one for dinner tonight."

   Later in the day we are finally able to spend a good amount of time beekeeping in the hives scattered through the forest surrounding the village.



July 7th, Day 6 - we get a new generator, finally I can charge things! I leave my computer charging while we travel to another village where hives are kept in a veritable jungle. I return to find that my computer had fully charged up, but having been left on, fully ran down to 0% again when the generator was shut off.

   I've been asked to teach about business planning, which at this point I don't have much background in. The expectation makes me a bit anxious, I'm comfortable talking about beekeeping, I know it well, but what know I about business planning that I can teach a bunch of adults most of whom are older than me?
   This first day of dabbling in the subject I'm surprised to learn how fundamentally my ideas of doing business are from theirs. I think of the individual as the "entrepreneurial unit" -- the self motivated executor of plans to make a profit. They have evidentally come from a long history of a more socialist world-view and as a body seem to think of "the co-op" as the essential entrepreneurial unit. The answer to all problems when I ask them to brainstorm is always "strengthening the co-ops!" Strengthening the co-ops is all well and good in my opinion, but the co-ops should exist to support the individual beekeepers, not vice versa.



July 8th, Day 7 -We walk three kilometers through the forest to a neighboring village. The forest is beautiful with lush greenery including tall ferns, no trash or pollution or sign of industrial modernity, just the occasional little homestead of a few cute huts with their own fenced in little crop plots. The beekeepers troop along the forest path carrying their suits, boots, buckets and such on their heads.
   At our destination village we split into two groups to do beekeeping and when we reconvene some women from the other group who had been kind of the the periphery on previous days proudly announce they had worked the bees without gloves, excellent.
   Someone says there's a traditional hive nearby ready to harvest and would I like to see them harvest it? "of course!"
   So we tromp a few hundred yards to where it is. This is the wicker basket style hive, located low in a small tree. They smok the bajeezes out of it and then start tearing it open. It clearly had been going for awhile, has old brood and old hatched out swarm cells. They toss the brood into the bushes, collect the honey, and then put a topbar hive in its place in hopes all the displaced bees will occupy it.

July 9th, Day 8 - We finally got a generator good enough to enable us to do a slide-show assisted presentation -- there's plenty of things which are best conveyed with pictures and diagrams. At one point though the rain outside and on the corrugated roof over our heads is so loud we can't hear each other and have to wait till it dies down.
   In the afternoon I'm out wandering around with my little buddy Mamadou de Boba again. We are joined by another boy of about 9, who shows us a place by the river where there's a bare muddy slope and of course you can take a bucket of water and pour it at the top and watch as it flows down in various channels -- what young boy isn't amused by that?? And very interestingly when you pour water in the right place at the top there seem to be small underground tunnels from which the water spouts out lower down the slope. Neat!
   So this is fun and keeps us entertained for awhile, I try not to get too muddy but at one point I slip on the muddy slope and fall down. Upon returning to the house I was staying in I am slightly mortified to find the beekeeping federation president and his wife, apparently on a sort of formal visit, sitting inside with Bara, all dressed nice, and here I am coming in all muddy. I felt myself like a small boy coming home all muddy to everyone's disappointment.



July 10th, Day 9 - We make candles in the morning, which is very successful. But later we have the business development presentation which I'm dreading as I really don't know what to say.
   Bara, however, has been translator for numerous business development presentations before, from people who specialize in the stuff. Baro, this stoical religious Malian, who spends his evening carefully making tea over coals, and is fond of pointing out the medicinal properties of random herbs he finds by the path, was suddenly holding forth on all the latest corporate boardroom buzzwords and making diagrams on page after page of the large eisel of flip-paper I had barely made use of.
   That afternoon he gets his hands on some aloe and sitting there on the porch, after telling me about its numerous medicinal properties, he carefully, lovingly, slices slivers off the tapered blade of aloe and eats them like they're sacred wafers.



July 11th, Day 10 - We make soap and then conclude the training. The landcruiser returns to bring us back to the capital. We spend the next two days driving back to the capital, ominously passing red cross ebola response convoys heading inland.

July 15th. Day 14 - Back in the capital. In the early hours of morning I listen to the patter of rain on the windows and the ululating call to prayer reverberating around the city in the dark pre-dawn hours. My back aches, my nose is running, I have a sore throat, a general feeling of fatigue. What are the initial symptoms of ebola, you might idly wonder? Well they are an achey back, a running nose, a sore throat, a general feeling of fatigue...