October 15

TGIF! Last day in Maweni, and the end of my so called holiday. This morning I finished working on flip charts in the office, and at about noon again we headed out to the village to close the week of training. The last day of training, when we're usually away in the villages are concluding what we'd taught and answering any questions, taking some photos and having the villagers sing songs to us. Today since we are commuting, we could fit more lessons into the afternoon and I was expected to teach more material. We had been teaching in an unfinished 'office building'-- an edifice made of cinderblocks and a tin roof which housed several bird nests and the unfinished rooms in the building were home to dozens of lizards (those who know me well, can say I was not excited about these digs). When we arrived, a good number of villagers had already been there and I was ready to put the past two day's frustrations behind me and get on with the lesson.

I talked about companion planting and the importance of crop rotation, and they were pretty keen on companion planting. As farmers, I'm sure they understood the benefits of crop rotation. What was interesting was our lesson on natural pest control methods. We discussed ways to fence your crops, and our SA Trainer introduced some herbs that GSC teaches villagers to mix in a bucket with water and ferment. This solution gets sprayed onto the crops and the smells and chemicals from marigold, lemongrass, rosemary, neem and other things naturally deters bad pests. Many of the villagers had never seen lemongrass or rosemary in particular which I thought was very interesting--those two things are commonly used in teas. I was grateful there were no giggles as I was speaking today, and no one laughed at my broken Swahili as I spoke. Overall the lesson went well and when we did our small graduation ceremony and handed out certificates, the women were gracious and the men weren't being gross. They sang a lot of songs for each person as they recieved their certificates. After refreshments again, we all took photos of the group in front of the 'office'. I had to laugh when the man who'd stubbornly insisted I was English persisted that I must share a copy of the photo with the group. With my camera, I had to explain it was not a polaroid and in the middle of the bush was virtually impossible to make duplicates. He asked in Swahili to another counterpart, and post face palm I just had to accept he's just a stubborn man.

This group was great, they were one of the first I'd worked with that were excited about BIA and were familiar with the material. But it wasn't easy training them! For those mwanawake (ladies) who will teach community groups in the future, wear pants! And don't get sick!