Passion fruit

I've been growing a passion fruit vine on the side of our house for about a year and it's done a good job of shading most of the wall, but a poor job of producing delicious fruit for us. That's because it's the yellow variety (common here in Senegal), which is not self-fertile, so you need two genetically different plants to swap pollen. Easy enough if you have a source of seed.

Taken at the beginning of rainy season

 

There are other options. You can grow the purple variety which is preferred in most of the world due to less acidity and better flavor. Purple flowers will self-pollinate. Or you can graft purple onto yellow to take advantage of yellow's disease/pest resistance. 

I'm trying all three. I have a purple vine which just flowered last month and has nine large fruit maturing. 

 

 I am rooting out about 30 cuttings from the yellow vine onto which I will graft purple and see how that goes. I also got the yellow vine to accept purple pollen and make a fruit (which the internet seems to think is not possible) and I'll plant out the resulting hybrid seeds to see what comes of it.

Ask me about my mango seedlings next time.

(A)

 

Tabaski

It’s the time of year in Senegal where we start seeing loads of sheep for sale on most busy corners in town. They’re usually kept under a white pop-up shade tent to keep them out of the blazing sun. Or they’re stuffed onto roof racks of taxis or a whole herd of them are on top of buses, with the driver hoping he secured them enough for the bumpy roads.

When you think “sheep,” you probably picture a plump, wooly creature. Here, we have short-haired sheep and they are somewhat difficult to tell apart from goats. We’ve learned that if the tail sticks up in the air, it’s a goat; if it falls downward, it’s a sheep. Sheep are more valuable and have nicer meat than goats. The price of an average sheep once it’s ready to slaughter is between 1 month’s labor (minimum wage) up to 4 month’s labor for a 3-year-old ram.

Why all the sheep? It’s the biggest feast of the year on Friday: Tabaski. The holiday celebrates Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Ishmael (not Isaac), when an angel stopped him from killing his son and a ram was killed instead. It falls at the end of the Islamic calendar year so it changes each year based on the lunar cycle. The feast usually lasts 2-4 days and each family is expected to buy and slaughter their own sheep. Can you imagine spending $8,000 dollars on a holiday meal (if you make $2000 per month)?  Along with an expensive meal, it’s normal to have new clothes made for the whole family, buy new shoes for the kids, have your hair braided, give monetary gifts to the poor, and if you live far away from family, send money. Markets and street corners start getting busy a good month before the actual holiday. (Think Black Friday until Dec 24^th.)

Tabaski is the day to offer forgiveness and accept forgiveness from everyone you know. The greeting on the street and in homes is different that day. Effectively, instead of “Hello, how are you?” it’s “Hello, how are you? Forgive me.”  I’ve asked a couple Senegalese friends what this forgiveness looks/feels like in their homes. The answer I’ve gotten is that it’s not real forgiveness. “People say they forgive, but then by the end of the meal they are fighting with each other or gossiping about a family member.”

And what does this holiday mean for the large number of Senegalese who are living hand to mouth each day? It means that when my friend’s father calls from the big city and says, “Why haven’t you sent me money for Tabaski?” she has to repeatedly lie and say that she will do her best to find money to send him, knowing she’ll have to choose to either send the $4 that she gets that day to her father, or choose to feed her kids. Choosing the latter causes her to lose family honor and connection, and makes her less able to call on her father or siblings in the future if she is in desperate need of money. She also feels shame for not being able to celebrate the holiday as she should, with new clothes, fancy hair and a nice fat sheep. Year after year her relational poverty leads her deeper into physical poverty, and vice versa.

Perhaps her only hope is that on the day of the holiday, she can call up her father and ask forgiveness, and at least he has to say he forgives her.

What would it look like to be transformed by a greater sacrifice, Jesus, who went up the mountain in submission to his Father and gave his own life for the forgiveness of all who would believe in him? Would the forgiveness translate into grace for family members and care for those less fortunate (without expecting something back)?   

(J)

Farm projects

I have been busy at the farm on a number of things the last six months.  One of my primary projects is getting up to speed on the solar grid system that was installed by a Dutch teammate who is only around every few months. There has been a historical lack of oversight and on-the-ground expertise to troubleshoot and manage power usage, and as the resident computer nerd, that task has fallen to me. That means planning new solar panel installation, setting up solar panel cleaning procedures (at its thickest, the dust cuts production by over 40%!), automating pump timing and adjusting parameters as needed.

Before on the right, after on the left.

Used a fan dial to allow manual operation if desired, and used a $3 eBay circuit board powered from a 5v USB adapter (clock is maintained by a coin cell) to turn the relay on and off. 

It's been fun to get a crash course in a whole lot of new equipment. I've worked on the following:

1) Timer controlled relays to manage motor controllers for pumps
2) Frequency derating for solar inverters to allow excess solar power to be properly controlled

I was also tasked with setting up internet at the farm. Recently, a 4G tower was put into operation a few kilometers away, and I discovered we could get fairly fast internet on top of the water tower. From there, I learned more about point-to-point 802.11n bridges, subnet masking and port forwarding, and have cobbled together a fairly reliable wireless network that provides internet access to 6 different areas on the farm, and automatically controls data usage through a quota system (using free software!)

When COVID-19 became serious, I was asked to adapt the concept of tippy-taps (touchless hand washing) to our local context. An afternoon of trial and error led to a cheap and effective solution using easily obtained materials. A set of two tippy-taps (one for soap, and one for water) costs less than $2. Through a gofundme type website in France, Beer Sheba was given around 10,000 euro to use for COVID-19 relief, and part of that was used to supply over 400 tippy-tap wash stations to families in villages around the farm. We organized the production and distribution of over 20,000 masks and many kilos of moringa powder (to support the nutrition/immune systems of elderly villagers).

Tippy taps using 13¢ bottles, 17¢ foot pedals, 38¢ string, 5¢ rebar. 

I was amazed at the generosity of folks wanting to support relief efforts here when there was so much need in their own countries.

There's a lot more happening, but will have to wait for the next post (hopefully sooner than two years from now)

(A)