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MANGO
STREET: When he saw his town’s fruit surplus,
Ludlam started experimenting with a solar dryer. |
Paula Hirschoff |
It was painful—our
introduction to African honey harvesting. One night
in a national forest outside Dakar, my wife Paula Hirschoff
and I donned the white bee suits that we’d brought
from the States for our service as Peace Corps volunteers
in Senegal. Our host, beekeeper Alain Vautier, remarked
that white was a poor color choice—it would attract
bees in the dark. Americans harvest honey in the sunshine,
when white makes perfect sense.
As the crew smoked out the first hive, thousands of
furious bees lit on our suits. In our finest, industrial-strength,
made-in-America bee gear, we did not flinch. Paula and
I are returned Peace Corps volunteers: each of us served
decades ago—me in Nepal, she in Kenya. In retirement,
we decided to re-enlist and follow our dreams to Africa.
We felt well prepared, confident that we could handle
life in a developing country.
At the hives, we grew uneasy. Bees seemed to be crawling
inside my mask. Paula thought she felt something crawling,
too, but kept quiet because she had faith in her fine
white suit.
Moments later, bees started stinging us in the face.
We started to flee—a futile effort because the
bee-filled masks came right along with us. Once we had
run far from the hives, our beekeeper friends helped
us disrobe. I was stung on my lip and Adam’s apple
and beneath my eye.
African bees are slightly smaller than their North
American counterparts and far more ferocious. The zipper
attaching the hood to the rest of our outfits ended
just beneath the chin, where it was covered with a Velcro
flap. There, through a tiny gap, the African bees had
entered. We stuffed sponges into the tops of the zippers
to prevent further intrusions.
We resisted going back to the hives. But our friend
chided us. If we didn’t return, bee phobia might
haunt us for the rest of our lives. So we went back
to help lift out frames of honeycomb as thousands of
bees—60,000 per hive—buzzed and whirled
around us. It was an edgy labor.
By the end of the harvest—with 25 pounds of honey
in hand—it was midnight. As we drove to the honey
processing plant, the beekeeper’s apprentice reached
into the back of the car and handed us slabs of honeycomb
dripping with the most delectable honey we’d ever
tasted. We bit off chunks and munched out all the sweetness,
spitting beeswax out the car window. By morning, the
right side of my face had swollen grotesquely—but
we had a great tale about our nighttime escapade in
the forest.
There’s no keeping our encounter with the bees
from becoming a metaphor about Peace Corps service.
Development work is always difficult, no matter how
prepared you are. Every challenge is intensely local;
you can’t simply import technology and expect
it to work at your site. The approach that local folks
use often has a rationale that outsiders don’t
understand. You need to expect to get “stung”
and to experience many disappointments, along with a
few sweet surprises.
As we settle into life in Guinguinéo, a small
town in the scrubland of west central Senegal, I’m
gaining other insights into how the developing world
has changed and how I as a volunteer am different now
from the volunteer I was during my initial Peace Corps
tenure.
In Nepal, a kingdom in the heart of the Himalayas,
I was profoundly isolated. Few of my villagers had met
a Westerner and they laughed when I tried to tell them
that humans had just landed on the moon. I hiked 32
miles round-trip to get my mail. With no television,
radio or newspapers, no villager knew that people elsewhere
in the world enjoyed a higher standard of living.
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RETURN TO SERVICE: Hirschoff, earlier stationed in Kenya, teaches accounting to grocery store managers. |
Chuck Ludlam |
Now, nearly 40 years later, everyone is connected to
everyone else. Like much of the developing world today,
Senegal is intensely engaged with the West. Many Senegalese
emulate the French and long to emigrate to Europe or
America. Many folks have access to cell phones, and
a national television channel airs soap operas and World
Cup matches. The communications revolution has allowed
all to know in painful detail how poor they are. This
knowledge can eat at their minds and create desperation.
Modern communications also keep Americans better informed
about the developing world, although the news mostly
emphasizes the negative. Westerners are fed a constant
diet of “hunger porn”—graphic scenes
of famine, civil war and AIDS victims. In the decades
between my two terms of service, Americans have lost
their innocent optimism that national independence and
development assistance would transform the lives of
Third World peoples.
The worst result of the engagement with the West is
a pervasive belief—at least from what we’ve
seen among the Senegalese—that infusions of capital
are the easy path to development. “Donnez-moi
xaalis (give me money)” is a repeated refrain
in the streets, a demand never heard before nongovernmental
organizations descended on the developing world. Our
response to the pessimism and culture of dependence
is to focus on what we can accomplish day to day with
an emphasis on local resources.
The West has an insatiable appetite for material goods:
it’s maddening that we have so much when the Senegalese
often want for the basics. But our American insatiability
can be positive when it comes to our thirst for innovation.
In a 33-year career in public policy, I came to believe
that innovation was the driving force behind America’s
economic might. So innovation is the approach I’m
trying to stress in my Peace Corps work.
Starting with fruit drying. During the rainy season,
sweet juicy mangoes are so abundant that thousands rot
on the ground. I designed a solar food dryer and challenged
five local women to team up to dry mangoes. Together,
we’re learning how to select for ripeness, to
coat the slices with ascorbic acid to preserve the orange
color, to protect the fruit from insects, and to market
(with lots of free samples) a product never seen here
before.
Senegal is certainly more open to innovation these
days than Nepal was 35 years ago. As an agricultural
extension agent in Nepal, I peddled the then-new “Green
Revolution” rice, wheat and corn. When the demonstration
crops generated 20 to 40 times more than the local varieties,
the farmers concluded, “Chuck ji, you’re
a good farmer.” End of analysis. The farmers were
unprepared for change, experimentation, trial-and-error
or risk-taking.
It’s easy to understand why farmers in the developing
world are conservative: they live with the constant
threat of infestations, drought and other devastation
leading to hunger and famine. For four months last spring,
our region in Senegal experienced a massive invasion
of millions of four-inch crickets that devoured every
leaf, fruit and flower in sight. When there was nothing
left to eat, they disappeared. People here fear they’ll
return before harvest of the rainy-season crops (millet,
corn and sorghum). Innovation can lead to profits and
higher yields, but it also can fail and leave them desperate.
Thus, they are reluctant to try new approaches.
My understanding of this point of view enables me to
be patient with the day-to-day results of my efforts
as an agricultural extension agent. I know that development
is a long-term effort. When Paula and I returned to
my Nepal village in 1998, we found not only that the
villagers remembered and warmly welcomed me, but that
the farmers were all using the high-yield seed varieties
that I had demonstrated 35 years earlier.
It’s been a pleasant surprise to learn that in
Senegal, I can accomplish more in months than I did
in two years in Nepal. To combat heat and seasonal drought,
I’ve been introducing drip irrigation systems,
water-absorbing polymers that can be incorporated into
the soil, and drought-resistant seeds. I’m ready
with lessons in arid farming that come from the Pueblo
Indians. In an area where the soil is often too warm
for seed germination, I’m experimenting with pépinières
(nurseries) planted in earthen jars covered with wet
cloth and straw, and pre-germinating seeds in water-soaked
cloth. It’s a pleasure to share the results of
these experiments with local gardeners—and to
believe that this work can have lasting impact.
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