Moringa Bike Tour

So you might be asking yourself what on earth is Amy doing over there in Benin she certainly hasn’t been posting any blogs? Well here goes.

In January I went on a four day bike tour with 12 other volunteers. It was like a parade of Americans. This is why the bike tours are successful; you get a bunch of foreigners riding through a village in the same brightly colored tee shirts with their bike helmets and fancy American bikes and people are going to notice. And promptly come and see what all the ruckus is about. Next, we impart wisdom on them in our broken French and even worse local language skills to the point of total confusion. Finally, we hop back on our bikes and ride off with a cloud of dust trailing behind and hopefully having enlightened a few minds.

We went to 14 different villages and talked about the benefits of Moringa a tree that gives lots of vitamins when eaten but tastes really bad. We broke the villages into groups: Men, women, and children. I worked in the children’s group. We planted seeds of Moringa with the kids and told them how to take care of their developing trees. The women’s group was information on how to prepare leaves in cooking and the nutritional benefits of the tree. We did do one cooking demonstration. The men’s group focused on reforestation.

The tour was really fun but I don’t know how successful. I question mass sensibleizing and its effectiveness, a debate that continued the duration of the tour. I think a really poignant moment was after the kids group was finished this little girl was standing in front of me just staring holding her seedling bag. I asked her what she was going to do with her baby tree. Her response was turning the bag upside down and dumping the dirt and seed on the ground all the while never breaking eye contact. We planted over 300 trees with the kids, I wonder how many will actually grow. I am aware that we are hoping to influence a percent of the people we talked to. Even a small percent is still a lot of individual people. What I haven’t been convince of yet is how much we are actually educating the people we are talking to.