Peace Corps is a life-defining leadership experience.
Volunteers live, learn, and work with the community overseas for 27 months,
providing assistance in a variety of program areas, including agriculture.
Agriculture is the primary economic activity of most of the world's people,
yet many communities are unable to produce enough food.
Peace Corps volunteers contribute sustainable solutions to a community's agricultural
issues and help preserve natural resources. From experienced professionals in the fields of
agricultural sciences to recent college graduates, volunteers bring diverse experience and educational
backgrounds to their assignments. I do urban agricultural work.
I work at the hospital farm, and we have a huge garden that we use
to feed the patients that are in the infectious diseases ward.
Any vegetables we harvest here go to a kitchen that they make alternative meals for the patients.
And then we also have another garden at the psych ward where we use it as a form of therapy with patients.
Also do trainings with low-income families throughout all of Dakar, teaching them basic microgardening
skills and then
we'll start working on gardens in their own houses to better their nutrition.
We do lots of things with Jared.
We water our microgardens and bigger gardens. We transplant vegetables from our gardens.
We do weeding together. All the activities of the garden we do side-by-side with Jared.
Before going to my village we had about 12 weeks of training. During that time
part of the training was language training and the other part was technical training.
I don't have any experience with guinea pigs,
which is an important and cultural animal
here in the Andes.
And we learned about guinea pig production, guinea pig management. Also we went to a national park and learned about llama management
and so
during those 12 weeks it really helped out a lot to fortify the animal facts
not that I received as an undergraduate.
One of the things that we learned in training was the use of worms to make compost. Again promoting
organic agriculture, farmers needed to start looking at chemical fertilizers and comparing
it with organic fertilizers and
how they could use local resources so that they could make it themselves, and that way
it would also be cheaper and more sustainable. What I wanted to get out of this was
to learn a method of farming and/or gardening that
would be beneficial for my community, especially
techniques that would use a lot less water. I believe my organization tried to do
a garden before,
but there was so little water that they were not able to
adequately cultivate the the land
and things like that, and every garden project seemed to die out. So I'm hoping that with the
new techniques that I've learned during this training that I will be able to implement a system
that would help save water
and also grow
very nutritious plants for the people that need them.
So the goals of this fish project - we have two - 
one is to insure better food security and a better source of protein through fish.
The second is to
sell the excess fish to receiVe money so that the project can keep going
and eventually expand to become a business.
When we start really going with the fish and soy, when we're ready to sell, we're going to talk more and more about
recordkeeping and how to plan and how to do all these things
and how to use the profits and how to reinvest wisely.
To find out more about serving overseas as a Peace Corps volunteer
please visit peacecorps.gov.
