moringa presentation at Langui

This morning, I went to the refugee camp to talk to the women about the benefits of moringa: nutritionally, for purification of water, medicinally, and how easily it grows. The goal is that by the rainy season enough moringa will be produced by a few of the refugees to plant 4 at each of the houses/plots in the camp. We planned this meeting for this day in December, and I called a few times during the week to verify and make sure the president of the women's bureau was letting all the women know.

I got to the camp running about 3 hours late with the UNHCR crew and was afraid that all the women who had been waiting for the meeting would have already given up and left. However, when I got there, I found that no women had even been called yet, that there were no chairs or benches or tarps set up, or anything. Quite typical, yet frustrating as I wanted to get there, talk and then get back to Garoua to do work in the office. So I got there, and they found three benches and I sat there with five women, thinking "there better be more women coming!" Meanwhile the president went around with a megaphone in the various quartiers. She had told me "Well I informed the women, but a lot said they were busy with this or that." And I thought, oh please don't have brought me out here for five women!!!

Often meetings don't start at a specified time, but after everyone has seen that you are seated there, they start wandering over. This is true in my village too. And means that meetings will often start an hour or more after you are seated there. It'd be great to have a book, but I feel rude reading when there are a few other people there waiting with you, so I just sit and talk.

Finally, after about an hour of women trickling in, there were probably about 90 women. This time, way too many for it to be incredibly effective. Women were standing in the back, behind me, to the sides, unable to hear or see the visuals. I had hoped and specifically asked for only the women of a certain "block" to be called, so that week by week I would talk to the women of each block, same information, but a smaller number of women. But they came from every block, as one hears about something going on and the rest come. However you take what you get and work with it, and one hopes that those who couldn't see or hear well will get a good explanation from their friends who were sitting in closer range. And always better more than less! It's always encouraging to have a few people in the "audience" who maintain eye contact, who nod and say "Yes!" to let you know they are understanding, following and that the information may be relevent to them, and I had one such woman who was my "angel". Actually I'm sure there were many others, but there was one prominant one sitting up front, about 50 maybe, beautiful, Arabic speaker who had such a great air about her, gentle but confident and capable. Throughout the whole presentation to almost everything I said she said "Uhhuh" "mmmh" 'Ah." And it was so nice. The other nice thing was that most of the women already knew the plant, yet didn't know all the benefits, and most all of them want it. The next step is working out details of producing that many trees and distributing them, and making sure they are planted well! There are about 950 households either tents or brick rooms in the camp, so that's a good amount of trees! The good thing about this tree is that it grows very easily, so should be a great tree for teaching some of the refugees in creating and maintaining their own tree nursery. Secondly, because it grows so quickly, people can reap the benefits, harvest the leaves in the first season, so even those who hope to repatriate, to go back to Chad after a few years may still benefit from it, (whereas planting slower growing trees, mangos or thorny species may seem more irrelevent to a refugee camp, although they did plant those communally this year too). Finally, if the tree production works well, and the women start drying the leaves and making a powder from it, there is the possibility of selling the powder to local health centers who then resell it in their pharmacies to breastfeeding mothers or for malnourished children, about 5 cents a packet. I look forward to seeing how this project works out, and hopefully having a good story from it.