So, what do you eat?

I have to say, it's one of the most common questions, yet I have failed to address it in this blog! So here it is, my food post.

In a lot of ways, it's simple. I eat the same things most days..

For lunch it's a community bowl, usually rice with one fish (fried, stuffed with pepper and spices) and veggies (seasonal; currently we've been getting eggplant, potato, cabbage, and squash). Other lunch dishes are rice with a peanut sauce with okra; or, a millet, bean and fish mush with oil (a lot better than it sounds I promise, though my family rarely makes it).

A bowl of the more meager variety, no fresh fish, but rice and veggies, dried fish and beans

For dinner it's a dish called haako (the dish has the same name as 'leaves'.. because that's what it is, leaf sauce!). It's made with bean leaves, peanuts, and fish all ground together poured over cornmeal 'cous-cous' called lecciri (pronouced: leh-chee-ree). I put 'cous-cous' in quotes because it's a lot grainier than the cous-cous you can buy in the states. Another dinner dish is called bassi which is this onion soup-esk dish with peanut butter and tomato sauce poured over lecciri. On other nights we have lecciri and fresh or reconstituted milk. My house most often eats the haako, but these are the 3 staples.

Haako (with beans!) and corn lecciri

I've saved breakfast for last because I eat that on my own, and therefore it varies. My family eats plain bread and coffee (though I argue to call it hot sugar water) so I chose to eat breakfast on my own. Sometimes I still buy bread and peanut butter, but more often I eat oatmeal, or a Clif bar, or if I've saved some lecciri from dinner the night before I'll make that with milk.

Otherwise, there's a lot of snacks as well. My good friend Ndiabel loves to feed me other than mealtimes, this last week alone she cooked a few meal/snacks: sweet potato tomato onion sauce, bean sauce, and fish and  fries with onion sauce (as you can tell, the same ingredients are recycled in many manners). Also, buying snacks on the street is easy enough, and range from tiny bags of roasted peanuts, frozen juice in bags (creme glace/"ice cream"), roasted corn (seasonal) to deep fried goodies such as beignets (donut holes) or fatayas (dough stuffed with onion sauces, sometimes fish). This is not including your usual selection at the corner shop: biscuits, cookies, cheese puffs (which are hilariously called Crax) and others of the "junk food" variety.

Though of all this great selection, my favorite snack has to be Vache Qui Rit (Laughing Cow cheese) with Mauritanian biscuits, occasionally with dried fruit if the care-package gods have blessed me. I have appeased my foodie side by convincing myself that Vache Qui Rit is something like Brie...

The best for last being.. frozen kossam! (Kossam is sour milk, or essentially yogurt... meaning frozen yogurt.) Often sold in quarter liter bags, it makes those 115 degree days bearable and delicious. Slice up one of those huge mangoes that are now in season and sold on the streets, and I think it almost puts any froyo shop in CA to shame.

Moringa, the Miracle Tree!

Throughout training as Env/Health volunteers we were fed a few key buzz-word projects that are our go-to work in all communities of Senegal. Among the maternal and child health, malaria work or general health infrastructure sessions we learned about the Moringa tree, also known as a "miracle tree" in the developing world due to its many nutritional properties and uses. They really sold it to us: It's full of vitamins and nutrients and is fairly easy to add to the diet: people can eat the leaves, either in leaf sauce or by drying it to make powder that you can put in any dish. Besides it's incredible nutritional composition, we could use the tree for everything! Live fencing; wind-breaks; alley-cropping... Lesson was: plant moringa, it's good for the soil and the people! Don't believe such an amazing tree exists? Read the wiki on Moringa for further info.

At first I was quite skeptical.. how can this one tree be so magical? Upon tasting the fresh leaves-- peppery, almost arugula-like--I started to cave.. I can get on board with a substitute for my favorite salad base. Then (being academically trained in human-environment interactions) I thought about the consequences of planting moringa everywhere.. Is it local? No, it's native to Northern India. Additionally, it's a drought-resistant species that is actually called "Nebedai" in local languages because the British colonists in The Gambia called it "Never die".. sounds like a possibly invasive species. So I remained uncertain about the seemingly wonderful tree.

But as I've been living in the desert for the past year I've realized one thing... I live in a sandy wasteland. There are very very few trees, and the only ones that are around usually have thorns. I've come to the conclusion, that in the Sahel, any living tree is better than no tree. And given it's drought-resistant qualities, it seems like a tree that can hack it in the Sahel. So I've started planting Moringa. Why not? Most people are willing to eat it; we already eat leaf sauce for dinner every night, but it's currently being made out of the more readily available bean leaves. And even we do nothing with these trees but keep them alive, that will be an environmental improvement in and of itself... things will actually look green.

I've started at my village's primary school. Working with the mothers of primary school children, the children themselves and any one else around to help, I've direct-seeded Moringa around the perimeter of the school. So far we've planted about 25 trees (all were sprouted and alive when I left village a few days ago... keeping my fingers crossed that they're still getting watered without my watchful presence in village..). As people see and get excited about these initial sproutlings, we will continue around the rest of the school, hopefully planting up to 100+ trees. I'll keep you posted on how this works out, but here's the progress so far:

Rice sack tree protectors. Necessary for high goat traffic.

Digging the protectors

And they've sprouted!

Hello, Moringa!