Community Gardens

This past weekend marked my largest project and training session of my service. For 3 days, 4 PCVs, one PC Supervisor, and another NGO representative worked in town to train 58 new and exciting garden and farming techniques. The work was exhausting and stressful, but the goal is to provide people with new techniques that can exponentially increase their garden and farm harvests, thereby increasing their income and standard of living.

This is a newly formed group of community members wishing to utilize the strength in numbers philosophy and work together to produce larger output than individual farmers can. This is the ideal group for PCVs work with. Also, this is an ideal project for Peace Corps as it involves the expertise and participation of all volunteers: Business, Agroforestry, sustainable agriculture, and much more.

Best of luck and thanks to everyone for your help! And once all 4 PCVs get to a central computer, we will have pictures eventually…

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Byron Yee

Peace Corps Volunteer - Senegal, 2009

Rain!!

For the first time in 8+ months, it rained!

The morning was warm and it sprinkled a bit. Not because of rain clouds necessarily, but because humidity was at a full 100%...

That night a somewhat frightening wind and rain storm struck my town. It continued to rain for about 4 hours into the morning. It was lovely and cool - for a bit. Then it was incredibly hot, humid, and full of flies and bugs.

Man, I really miss Seattle right now.

--Byron YeePeace Corps Volunteer - Senegal, 2009

Time for more Theatre!

This time, I had a break – sort of. Another PCV wrote a grant to invite a local professional theatre group on tour through several towns and schools. They did a performance on the protection of the environment. The students were captivated, entertained, and most importantly, educated.

This also re-inspired my local group to continue working hard and producing another fun little show. Thanks guys for the great work!

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Byron Yee

Peace Corps Volunteer - Senegal, 2009

Business Training: A lesson on how to teach

I was fortunate enough to have my supervisor, Talla, come to conduct a training with one of my groups I’m working with. Subject Matter: Roles and Responsibilities of a group, Contracts, and By Laws. These are subjects of which I have limited technical, let alone language skills to conquer. Overall the sessions were very well accepted and successful.

After he left, I had enough energy (and newly found inspiration) to conduct a training of my own. Subject matter: How to calculate profit; a simple equation. The challenge: half the women’s group was illiterate, and their primary language was Mandinka.

Needless to say, I’m very, very tired right now…

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Byron Yee

Peace Corps Volunteer - Senegal, 2009

An Epic Journey Completed

For the first time ever, I just completed reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The story was wonderful, captivating, and fun. Reading about a small hobbit conquering an entire dark world of evil somehow made my challenges in Senegal seem much less difficult and frightening. Thanks Frodo Baggins for the inspiration. And thanks Tolkien for creating such a beautiful story.

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Byron Yee

Peace Corps Volunteer - Senegal, 2009

Eco T Conference

All the EcoT volunteers spent a week in Dakar for a much needed 3 day training followed by Senegal’s first ever International Tourism Conference. The training was helped answer a lot of our questions and gave us PCVs a solid direction of work and development.

The conference was exciting as all major tourism companies and agencies were represented. Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade also made a special appearance, of whom I got about a 2 second glimpse. This conference also exercised my language skills once again, including newspaper and TV interviews in French and Wolof (Mom! I may have been on TV!).

After being away from site for an entire week, it’s time to get back to work. And now work on introducing Eco Tourism into my town as well.

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Byron Yee

Peace Corps Volunteer - Senegal, 2009