Peace Corps News

Two RPCVs help increase African Food Production

Senegal RPCV Molly Brown works at NASA monitoring farms from space to see if food crops are in trouble
Brown's maps start at NOAA, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which creates the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). That gives a green and brown picture of current vegetation conditions. She and her colleagues add rainfall measurements-- "If it rains today it will be green tomorrow" --and look at humidity and sea surface temperatures to create a vegetation forecast for the next one to four months. Based on those predictions and information about local markets across the region, Brown formulates a continuous map of market price forecasts. Their first maps, which will appear in the journal Land Economics, are of the dry central and northern regions of West Africa, where food prices are a matter of basic survival. "Because in this region, it rains only for four months or so," says Brown. "So, this humidity/rainfall information is then put together in a model and allows us to predict how green it's going to be two, three, four months into the future."

That prediction is important not just for food production, but also for food access -- whether people in the region can afford to buy food for their families. Brown combines these two factors to measure overall food security. When food security is critically low, it's time for international aid agencies to step in and help. When it's high, markets should be stable and people will have access to the food they need to survive. Brown says the Africa food price map will be available in 2008, with vegetation maps for other parts of the world in 2010. When are we going to see a map of prices at our local grocery store? Well, it's not that simple in a country as mobile as the U.S., Brown explains.

"So, in the U.S., it's completely different: we eat lettuce from California and we eat, you know, strawberries from Guatemala, and so because of the internationalization, the globalization of our market system, it's very hard to determine the impact of food production on local prices" she says. "In Africa, in these very small, informal markets, almost all of the grain that's bought and sold there is grown locally and is moved into the markets on foot." But U.S. farmers will still benefit from Brown's work. The maps that she and her colleagues plan to develop for the U.S. will predict vegetation and rainfall levels months in advance, helping farmers decide what crops to plant when.  Read more.

Cameroon RPCV Carol Miles has been working with African farmers to increase seed production of red kidney beans and get them into the hands of farmers where transportation systems are poor
Washington State University researcher Carol Miles has spent many months over the past five years traveling from Vancouver to Africa, planting, harvesting and cataloging beans. Her purpose is to help American farmers earn a profit and to help African farmers feed the hungry. Quietly and steadily, the internationally known vegetable horticulturist has joined with her assistant Liz Nelson and a changing crew of graduate students to test a new exotic mix of dried beans. In Western Washington and Oregon, the new varieties of beans may produce major profits for small, specialized niche farms. But the work that had been conducted at WSU's Research and Extension Unit here has shifted to a facility in Mount Vernon, north of Seattle. The move occurred amid questions about the future of the Vancouver site.

For African farmers, Miles and her students have been working to increase seed production of red kidney beans and get them into the hands of farmers where transportation systems are poor. "In Washington, we've been using colored and patterned beans," Miles said before leaving to work in Malawi. "These are beans that are not on the shelf anywhere, beautiful old beans, heirloom, in very pretty colors and patterns, that farmers have been selling from Olympia to Western Oregon, often at several dollars a pound." They've been a success, for example, on Laura Masterson's 47th Avenue Farm in Portland as well as at Ayers Creek Farm in Gaston, Ore. Masterson said she's been growing and selling Jacob's Cattle beans and cannellini beans that Miles developed, and has just started growing other varieties of dry beans from Miles' stock. "The beans are great. They are definitely profitable for us, a nice little niche option" said Masterson, who grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. "Carol is a tremendous resource. She saved us years of work. I can't tell you how tragic it is that she is not going to be here anymore."

Miles has developed an international reputation. She joined Washington State University in 1994 as an area extension agent specializing in vegetable production systems. She also has studied alternative high-value crops including edamame (vegetable soybeans), baby corn, pea shoots, wasabi and bamboo. Her interest in sustainable agricultural systems seems to have grown naturally out of the pattern of her life. Born in Rangoon, Burma, she attended grade school in Turkey, Nigeria and Panama. She graduated from high school in Afghanistan. She served in the Peace Corps, teaching vegetable production in Cameroon. There she also worked on a bean and cowpea project studying crop balancing and pest issues. She also worked on preventing blindness in Malawi with the Helen Keller Foundation and Save the Children. She saw a lot of subsistence agriculture in all these places and cultures, and her goal became working with farmers to create sustainable production systems that provide a source of well-being to both the family and the community. She has also worked on organic pest control, disease suppression and human pathogens. She has worked in Malawi and Tanzania on sustainable seed systems. She said she intends to carry on her work, wherever she can find space and interest. Read more.

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Spotlight on Peace Corps Niger

Michael R. Bell writes: Most farmers are subsistence farmers trying to produce enough food to feed their families
I have been in Niger for almost two weeks, experienced four very interesting bus rides, toured a small part of the Sahara desert and tried many new foods. One of the most impressive things I have seen over my time here is the complete dedication of these mostly young Peace Corps volunteers. Niger is the poorest country in the world today. When my daughter came here two years ago, it was the second-poorest country. The conditions under which these volunteers work and live is difficult at best. You should be very proud of the work these young adults do as Peace Corps volunteers serving around the world representing the U.S.

Most farmers are subsistence farmers trying to produce enough food to feed their families, share with others and possibly use as barter to obtain other needed items for survival. In the bush, which is where most Nigeriens live, daily routines are the same except during planting and harvest times. Families will raise livestock and poultry, vegetables, fruit if possible and all grow millett as their food staple. Feed for livestock is not grown. Land capable of growing a crop is used only to produce commodities to be used directly by humans. So how do they feed their livestock? Each morning a worker (probably one of their children) is assigned the task of taking the animals out further into the bush to forage. Animals that can find feed survive, those that can't don't. Since Niger is mostly desert, finding forage can be difficult. The Fulani are nomadic herders of animals such as cattle, goats, donkeys and camels, and are allowed to use certain areas of the country. After a day of grazing, the worker will lead the livestock back to the village for the night.

Nigeriens as a whole are a hardworking, intelligent, caring and happy people. They are generous with what they have no matter the circumstance. Those whom I have encountered during my stay here have all been quick to smile and find pleasure in everything, no matter the conditions. It has not taken long to get used to seeing camels grazing, being ridden or lead down a main street in a large city with typical automobile congestion as I saw just a few minutes ago. Read more.

PCV Joshua writes: Eco-Farming in Niger
Last week we visited a terrific place named ICRISAT. ICRISAT is the leading West African seed bank and scientific location for testing new farming practices and developing improved crop varieties of millet, groundnuts, beans, cowpeas, and many other vegetables resistant to both pest and drought. There is a lot of information disseminated from this place but what caught my attention most for the purpose of this blog imput was their efforts towards developing eco-farming.

Eco-Farming is a term used to describe using a plot of land to its maximum potential incorporating both intercropping and agro-forestry in concert to reduce or eliminate the use of fertilizers and additional irrigation. A critical aspect of eco-farming is to reduce land erosion by making a snake like terraces or demi-loons (terrace like half moons) along the contour of the land. Within these terraces trees useful for nitrogen fixing, mulch, fruit, and other useful improvements are placed in these half moon circles.

The social impacts of this type of agriculture is that it provides the farmer with labor for nearly 10 months out of the year instead of the typical 5-6 months usually attributed to a typical growing season. The impacts of this aspect are incredible because when the farmer has income generation throughout the year there is no need for the farmer to "€œexode€". Which means work as a migrant laborer in neighboring countries depriving their families and nation of its most critical workforce and most productive of individuals. Read more.

Niger RPCV Angela "Khadija" Williams is helping gain asylum for Ansam, a translator for coalition forces in Iraq
Angela "Khadija" Williams, 53, is a veteran U.S. foreign-service officer who embraced Islam nearly three decades ago and now serves as a U.S. cultural affairs liaison at Camp Fallujah. A State Department colleague familiar with Williams' devotion to the translator's case affectionately described her as "a pit bull in hijab."

Angela Williams went to the University of Denver - the same institution from which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice received her undergraduate degree - before dropping out of graduate school in 1978 to join the Peace Corps. "The bug just got to me," Williams said. "I was so anxious to go out in the world and do something."

After volunteering in the West African nation of Niger, Williams joined the World Council of Churches relief agency in Senegal. A Muslim housemaid there helped Williams convert to Islam in 1981, the culmination of a longtime spiritual quest. Switching faiths proved just as controversial for Williams as for Ansam's family. She lost her job with the Christian relief group and faced a strained relationship with her parents, who were devout followers of the Church of God and Christ. "My father hung up the phone," Williams said. "I called back again and my mother answered this time. She said, `I still love you,' then she hung up too."

Williams remained in Senegal, where she studied Islam and married a local Muslim activist. He died of a heart attack when she was five months pregnant; she miscarried three months later. That experience, Williams said, helps her empathize with the grief of the Iraqi women she reaches out to in Anbar. "I was a 24-year-old widow, so I understand how it is out here to be a young widow," Williams said. "I would walk the streets in Washington, D.C., and ask myself, `Why am I alive?'" Struggling to recover from the tragedy, Williams dabbled in agricultural studies, then worked briefly at the World Bank. She found her calling in 1989 when she joined the U.S. Foreign Service, which offered her the opportunity to create cultural affairs programs in far-flung posts across the globe.

Ansam and Williams first crossed paths when they worked on an empowerment program for Iraqi women in Anbar. They clicked instantly, marveling at the parallels in their lives: grief for their parents, tests of their faith, life as civilian women among battle-hardened Marines and a determination to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Ansam and Williams spent the past week in Baghdad, where Williams lobbied U.S. refugee officials, compiled Ansam's recommendation letters, surfed the Internet for federal resettlement options and sent flurries of e-mails to military and civilian friends with influence in Washington.

When Iraqi officials stalled on Ansam's passport, Williams picked up the phone and warned them in Arabic to issue the document or face her wrath. "I believe God has his angels and Angela is one of them. If I get out of this, I owe her my life," Ansam said. "The others tried; I know they did. They wrote nice letters, but it always ended with a problem with the law."

The friends cut a striking pair as they strolled together through the ornate marble halls of the Republican Palace one recent day. Ansam was in full camouflage and toted a Burger King sack. Williams was in her trademark black and yelled, "Assalamu alaikum!" - the Islamic greeting of "Peace be upon you" - to Iraqi colleagues. They walked to lunch, oblivious to the double takes of the soldiers and security contractors who roam the palace. Williams put her arm protectively around Ansam, looked her square in the eye and said: "No one's forgetting you." Read more.

Caption: Ansam, an Iraqi translator for coalition forces whose last name is withheld because of death threats against her, at Camp Fallujah. Ansam hasn't been able to gain asylum in the United States, despite letters of recommendation from a Marine brigadier general, several colonels and a number of other officers who praised her service as a translator and guide. Photo: Hannah Allam/MCT

Niger RPCV Charles Dufresne is a Partner at InterWorks, a Madison firm that helps agencies around the world respond to disasters and provide humanitarian aid
"I started off as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa and did that for two years. I was involved in community development programs and . . . I got involved in setting up groups and technical experts to transfer those skills. Then I worked with a language and literacy training organization in Minnesota, the Minnesota Literacy Council, their English as a second language program, with refugees and immigrants settling in the Twin Cities. Quickly I got involved in setting up training and recruiting tutors so I found myself again involved in that. I got increasingly intrigued in how people learn."

I work with people who are trying to do humanitarian work and they're working in extremely complex situations, places like Sudan and Afghanistan . . . to say nothing of New Orleans. They're often put into positions and jobs where they have the desire to do something but not the refined skills and knowledge to do it. So again you come back to training and learning to equip these people to be more effective. "There's no such thing as perfection. There's only the process of perfecting." Read more.

Praise for Niger RPCV Susan Rich's "Cures Include Travel"
"Susan Rich writes gorgeous lyrical poetry which so courageously tells us the truth about the world, tells us the world is much larger than we Americans usually like to admit. Her beautiful ear, her fierce attention to detail, her deeply human empathy inspire me and make me glad. I am glad, no €”thrilled that there exists such a unique and memorable voice writing today about the joys and grievances of our planet, writing with such charge in ideas and language. In this age of irony as an end in itself and of art for art's sake, it is a rare luck to encounter a poet such as Susan Rich for whom living in this world and writing about it is one and the same flash of poetry's transforming revelation."

A generation of war-lords have made Somalia an archetype of natural disintegration and the power of tyrants. Even now, with the death of Mohammed Farah Aideed, there is no end in sight. But there is another dimension to Somalian politics: the radical role of women. Two years before the entire country collapsed into civil war, in Kismayo, Somalia's southern coastal city, something happened that momentarily interrupted the slow march of strife over the body politic. A few dozen women, defying the conviction that enjoins female sartorial modesty, bared their breasts in public in front of a crowd of men. Fists raised, voices harsh, they shouted "Rise, Rise!", challenging the men to action, reproaching them for their failure to confront the excesses of the dictatorship. By challenging the men in this manner, the women implied that they would not from then on defer to them as husbands, fathers, or figures of authority. (From The Times Literary Supplement (London), (November 15, 1996), pp. 44) Read Susan Rich's Poem "the Women of Kismayo" about this event:

The Women of Kismayo

The breasts of Kismayo assembled
along the mid-day market street.

No airbrushed mangoes, no
black lace, no underwire chemise.

No half-cupped pleasures,
no come-hither nods, no Italian

centerfolds. Simply the women
of the town telling their men

to take action, to do something
equally bold. And the husbands

on their way home, expecting
sweet yams and meat,

moaned and covered their eyes,
screamed like spoiled children

dredged abruptly from sleep—
incredulous that their women

could unbutton such beauty
for other clans, who

(in between splayed
hands) watched quite willingly.

Give us your guns, here is our
cutlery, we are the men!

the women sang to them
an articulation without shame.

And now in the late night hour
when men want nothing but rest,

they fold their broken bodies, still
watched by their wives cool breasts

round, full, commanding as colonels—
two taut nipples targeting each man.

— Susan Rich, from her collection of Poetry "Cures include Travel" Follow this link to order the book.

Read more about Peace Corps Niger.