Mékhé by night

So we just got back from three full days in a little remote village a few hours drive from Dakar – Mékhé! Mékhé is special because it is one of the more active ecovillages in Senegal. It has a very vocal, dynamic female population who take it upon themselves to improve their situation.

The goal of the project was to cook traditional meals and note the quantities of ingredients, quantities of fuel used, and time of cooking, to understand how much time and fuel can be saved with the solar oven. Three friends and coworkers came as well – Fatou Lo, our wonderful and glamorous CRESP translator and facilitator who is full of life and spunk, Khadi, a Senegalese native turned New-Yorker who is spending the summer here as well, and Anne, the newest ESW addition to CRESP, who has yet to chose a project to work on. We enjoyed her company during the trip and hope she wasn’t too bored!

On Wednesday, June 21, we got to Mékhé around 2pm after an adventure filled trip by rented, beat up car. Our driver got pulled over at a check point, and was forced to pay a small bribe. Turns out our driver had an expired paper, which isn’t usually a big deal, but because he had two white people in the car, the cop knew he could get money. I was astounded because the cop seemed so professional! Turns out this happens all the time. Fatou pulled out the equivalent of a dollar and we were able to roll off.

We pulled up to Ngournay’s house and said our hellos, then unloaded our equipment and baggage into the house. She is one of the dominant women here – and she insisted that we, the foreigners, stay with her rather than at another house. She has a rival in the village, who later stormed over to her house, demanding that we stay with her. We compromised by dividing ourselves into two groups for sleeping.

Ngournay’s family has a solar oven that is used not only for cooking family food but also for cooking meat for sandwiches to sell. Clearly, her family makes a profit and they are very happy to have an oven.

Using funds from the Global Ecovillage Network, Mékhé has installed 50 solar ovens in homes in the Ndiop quarter of the village, and almost all have been successes (the women actually cook with them at least a few times a week). They also have a micro credit system that I know little about. The goal of that is to pool money and let a small number of women start their businesses with it and repay it later

Each oven was sold to the women for 15,000 Fcfa, or around 30 US dollars. They have the choice of paying all up front or to pay 1,000 Fcfa per month for 15 months. Because the cost to produce these ovens was funded by the Fund de l’Environnement Mondiale (FEM), the cost of the oven to the women goes directly into a bank account for their use. As far as I know, no decision has been made for the use of this money. It may potentially be used as microcredit, where it will be loaned to a woman in the community as a significant investment in her enterprise, such as a mill for grinding crops. Ordinarily, she would not have been able to afford such an expensive piece of equipment, but with the loan it is possible. She would be expected to repay the loan within a certain period of conducting her business, so that the loan could be shared with the next woman waiting. This system has been shown to be effective since there exists such a tight social structure among the families and especially the woman in villages like Mékhé. A woman given the loan takes her responsibility to be successful and repay the money very seriously, and probably knows the woman waiting in line really well. The same responsibility has not been shown among the male populations of these villages.

The solar oven project is just the 1st stage in the effort to improve the deforested environment of many of Senegal’s villages. Deforestation caused by people cutting down trees to burn as cooking fuel has been treated by government subsidized butane fuel. My family in Yoff, the Gaye’s, depend highly on this fuel to cook. It is painless and easy in relation to using wood and charcoal fires. Another solution is to replant trees. FEM has sponsored a reforestation project in Mékhé. There is a good sized nursery at the women’s center in the back of the Ndiop quarter. It has 7 species of trees, all to be used for asthetic and shade purposes. As of now, they do not have plans to use any of these trees as fuel. I was hoping they would say that they did, since the community depends on wood still. Although the ovens have been a big success, you can not use ovens for everything. Wood is perhaps the most sustainable alternative to ovens, as it can be produced and packaged locally and is renewable. Charred wood, another alternative, is very popular in the village, but I do not yet understand where it comes from and how it stands sustainably. Gas is the 4th alternative, which is in my opinion the least sustainable, as it comes from some far, far away place and has high transport cost, requires some messy production/extraction procedure, and needs metal bottles for storage and transport. Right now, the government subsidizes the gas in Senegal to reduce the use of wood and deforestation.

The nursery’s seven species of trees are:
1.) Goyovier (has cashes nuts inside)
2.) Eucalyptus
3.) Mantaly (flowering tree; provides shade)
4.) Codria (pronounced corja; flowering tree)
5.) Prosopis (tisane tree; you can boil it in tea and fight fatigue!)
6.) Citronnier (provides citrus fruit)
7.) Badamua

There are 12 groups of 10 women who rotate caring for the nursery. That amounts to 120 women involved! That’s well more than the 50 who own a solar oven. Each group works for 3 days in a row, either a morning or an evening watering shift. On Wednesday night, Khadi, Anne and I helped them water and got our hands dirty!

On Thursday, June 22nd, we prepared our scales, measuring spoons and papers to begin testing bouillie de riz, an easy meal to cook that is a lot like rice pudding. It’s absolutely delightful, as they mix the pudding with about a quarter of a kilogram of sugar and top it off with milk. Two of our participating families used charbon de bois (charcoal) to cook it and two used bois de chauffe (wood). I was astounded by how little fuel it took to feed a large family! Since I’d never cooked a real meal over a wood fire before, I could only imagine that it would require a large pile. In fact, the women used just a couple handfuls! The women involved were wonderful – they did just what they needed to do. They followed our directions very closely. They waited for us to arrive and take weights and quantity measurements before they started cooking, and they were actively involved in the measuring process itself.

The next day we cooked Yassa, a delicious rice dish with a brown sauce with fried onions and either smoked fish or chicken mixed in. The following day we cooked Daxine, a really nice dish made from peanut paste and beans with fish. The experiments went over well, and the families seemed obliging to help us, although curious, since we were paying for their ingredients and spending time with them. Ngournay helped us pick the four test families, choosing not only personal friends of hers, but also families that could benefit from a good free meal- with lots of children and little means.

Mékhé is a quiet place, very tight knit, and besides the few hours a day we used to experiment, we had little else to do. Thankfully, Fatou is blessed with the gift of gab, and she chatted it up with the community. She’d spent 2 months there last summer, working with a bunch of nutritional interns, so she knew the village well already. Mékhé By Night, she joked, as we moseyed around the village at nightfall, as we were the center of attention for all those sitting on their porches, gazing into the distance.

On Friday, we travelled to the other side of town with Ngournay to visit a family who just bought their oven and needed instruction. Ngournay is the woman to call! We entered the well decorated house, clearly belonging to a well-off family. The father greeted us very affectionately, and we walked through the house to the back yard where the oven sat in the middle of the patio. The whole family stood around, waiting for Ngournay to begin her tutorial. They listened attentively and asked questions. Talking with the father later, we found out that he paid quite a bit for his oven because he feels strongly for sustainable technologies and he knew it would pay off with increasing energy costs. His oven was specially made for him. It was really cool to see a family totally take it upon themselves to request an oven and pay money for it, making an investment in it.

Anyway, that’s more or less the trip, and I may go back in the near future to get more information. It’s hotter there, though, being much farther inland than Yoff, and I’m reluctant to return right away.

Tonight, Marian, the co-director of CRESP, is having the interns over for dinner. She’s a dynamic person, full of spunk, and nearing 70! She was a professor in nutrition and action research at Tufts for many years and is affiliated with Cornell too, so although she’s based at the CRESP annex building, she spends a good chunk of the year in the states. She has a lot on her plate these days but is a blast when you can get her attention for a few minutes. She’s a wealth of knowledge. Right now I'm at CRESP sitting at the front desk with my brother Ouzain who has to work here literally all day. We take turns on Sundays buying one another cookies. Today was my turn to buy, and I ate my sleeve in like half the time it took him. :p

Ok, signing out! Peace all- Melissa