Report from Sarjo, 12th June 2017

Dear Barbara

Wonderful trek as all the meetings were very very quick as most people are fasting. All the food will be available in the evening and that makes things easy for the villagers as there are fewer people coming from the next villages to attend.
Mangoes are in season at the moment in the villages and every village with a dryer is very busy on drying as we don’t know what the rains will be like.

In Sanden, across the bridge, they have someone in Brikama who will supply them with lots of plastic bags for dried mangoes. They first thought that they will give all their dried mangoes to this man to sell for them in Brikama, but now they change their mind and will keep everything they dry for the rains. No-one is sure of the rains this year.
We also visited Masembe in Kiang to see how their dryer and jam are going. It was fantastic - they assign 6 women to be responsible for all the drying and all the dried mangoes will be kept in the Lady President’s house until the rains. Then they will have a meeting with the men and see how to share it into compounds. They have dried more than a thousand plastic bags of mangoes and I was so happy and hope they will help to save them from hunger come August and September. It was a job well done by the Kabafita fund as most of the people who have our dryer are very busy drying. I have a lot of demands from villages without but I will first finish the ones on the list and then will decide where the next batch will go.

Very interesting I will be meeting 3 Lady Presidents, one from the former President’s village because we helped his mother's village. They will meet me tomorrow and on Thursday it is the Lady President from the north bank of Bunyadu. I think they all coming to make a case for a dryer because everything is not going well here and people want to keep some thing in the village in case come August they have something to manage in their stomachs.

In Kanikun Jara we didn’t stay long but they have a very big garden of cassava and before we arrived they pulled 6 bags of cassava ready for the process. Now they have their dryer, they started drying straight after the handing over.

We came back straight from the meeting with no food because we needed to get home before it was too late.
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Sarjo D