Days in Africa

It sort of hit me again today that I am in Africa. White men are called baturi. White women are called baturia. That is one way I know when the villagers are talking about us or are trying to get our attention.

This village I am working in is really a nice place. The fields are planned for multiple crops growing at the same time. From what I understand, they plant the millet and the guinea corn at the same time. Then the millet is harvested and the beans are planted. Then the beans are harvested and then the guinea corn is last. They grow rice during the wet season in the same fields as other crops like beans during the not-so-wet season. They do apply fertilizer about three or four times a year and I have seen pesticides and herbicides being applied too, but there aren't any tractors around that I have seen, so it is all done manually. I learned today that guinea corn is stored unprocessed in the silos. If it is unprocessed, then the ants can't get it and it can last up to three or four years.

As far as work, I shot a lot of soil in areas where ore processing occurred. One area right outside of a large compound had levels around 60000ppm. The kids were playing in the area and that same grinder which was grinding ore is now grinding food. There isn't a word for lead in Hausa, so we use "guba" which means poison. Unfortunately that one word coming from a baturi does not make a lot of sense to the villagers so I have to call in our interpreter to inform the head of the household.

Our interpreter...he is an amazing man who understands the problem of lead, cares for the people and kids of the village and can see how to fix the problem. We are all thankful for his talents and hopeful for his future.

Anyway, the landfill is complete, the clean soil piles will all be placed tonight, and the road will be built up adequately for the trucks to haul contaminated waste to the landfills. After that the excavator and the tipper will head to a large village on the way to the next two small villages which we will begin work on next week. Both the excavator and tipper driver are very talented. The excavator has a particular fondness for knocking over trees. These landfills at 30m by 10m by 5m deep and so any tree in the vicinity is taken out. It was actually comical on the placement of the previous landfill...we wanted to position the landfill to be able to keep the trees and the Nigerian interpreter was getting frustrated at us because we didn't understand that everybody else wanted the trees knocked down so they could use the wood for fuel or for other things. So down the trees went and in went the landfill right where the trees were.

We will be done with our part at this village tomorrow and heading to another on Sunday to site the landfill. Our commute time will triple on roads that are very rough. I know many people who love the rough muddy roads over here. To be honest I am getting tired of that part of this work but the landscape has its own beauty which makes each trip worth it. I have a favorite tree here but I don't even know what it is called.

We are down to four people in the compound from ten. The others kicked off cleanup in a village to the west and they are staging out at a larger village in that area. By the time we are done there will be about seven villages that will have been cleaned up with hopes of a third phase to clean up a village larger than all seven of these villages combined.