Update: Baby, Harvest, Garden, Tabaski, and VSL

Sorry it has been so long since I have updated.
The baby has a name
Here is a picture of the baby I mentioned in the last blog post. They have named him Jean. He is gaining some weight and doing much better! So happy about this! Both him and his mom seem to be back to day-to-day routine. The norm, however, is not that promising here. According to World Bank statistics, one in 10 babies will die before they hit the age of 5 here. Since the average woman has 7.6 children here (the highest in the world!) it is very common for families to know, first-hand, the death of a child. However, the death rate has improved drastically, even since we first came out. Let's continue to pray for people here to have a chance at life.

Jean growing healthy

Random picture...got stuck in "traffic"

Harvest
Harvest has come and gone in some parts of Niger (some have not yet harvested) and the staple for many of the Fulani is millet. These stalks are dried out and put into a grainery in bundles of a hundred stalks or so. One in every ten stalks of millet are put aside as a tithe and given to the poor or local religious leader. We were told that this harvest, though it was good, was not as large as past years. However, the family's harvest pictured below is quite abundant and this family is quite well-off in comparison to many here. Though they live in huts on the hot sand, they will not starve this year. Please pray with us as we want them to know that we love them but do not want to simply give them money, which is what they are hoping for.

Popped millet is a treat that is made once a year during harvest time. They will take fresh millet (not dried yet) and "pop" it over a charcoal fire. It is quite tasty!

Our guard preparing the millet to be popped - he brought some stalks from home to share with us

cooking the millet over hot coals

need to fan the flames....Nathan loves this stuff!

Rog learning how to get the seed off the stalk

Update on our garden - we are excited to show you that the garden is flourishing. The bottle irrigation with diluted urine fertilization seems to be doing wonders for the plants!! We hope the locals will adopt some of these practices to have their own flourishing gardens...even during dry season.

some of the trees (planted earlier) have grown taller than Rog

funny how Rog pretending to eat the Moringa leaves and this goat eating leaves off a tree look so similar!! Just a random picture taken while we were stuck in traffic...

Our friends celebrated Tabaski (also known as Eid al-Adha, or feast of the sacrifice) this month.  Here are a few pictures from it.

Our family got all dressed up to celebrate (fete) with our friends

The women get water from a well a few hundred meters away about 5 times a day. I did this twice on the day of the fete and was drenched after...and it wasn't from spilling water from the bucket! I was drenched with sweat from working under the hot sun. We are hoping to be able to provide cleaner water that is closer to the home through the drilling of our wells and pumps made from local material. We are hoping that small gardens close to home can be started in order to feed families during leaner months when food is harder to get.

Nathan fooling around...he had seen "the Karate Kid" recently. That is his friend and classmate in the background.

Tabaski is a festival that is celebrated with the sacrifice of a ram...after they slit its throat, they take the skin off and roast it over a fire...the whole city smells like bbq for a few days

just one of many "bbq" settings we passed that day

 Starting a women's group - We have been visiting a village for months now and hoped to start up a women's group for a while. It looks like it is happening! We have started a Village Savings and Loans (VSL) group with some ladies. VSL is a methodology that encourages people to create local pools of savings without outside intervention. Its intent is to create self-managed groups and it works well in remote rural areas or amongst the very poor in urban areas. We will meet weekly under this tree (the space where the ram was killed in the earlier picture).

Rog and one of our local friends helped to clear an area for us to lay mats and meet

Joy and I waiting patiently for the meeting to start...start time was 12:00 noon...

at 12:15 we started worrying that maybe we weren't going to have a women's group start....

 Ladies started trickling in at 12:30 and we were able to start by 1. Not too bad for a bunch of ladies that have no watches or cell phones so have no idea what time it is!!

This lady brought her pounding stick and work with her to the meeting...she had work to do but also wanted to be a part of the meeting!

This group of ladies (about 20) will meet to save their money and take out loans from each other as needed. We are also hoping to start French lessons or health teachings as we gather under the tree every week.

Counting in Fulfulde is EXTREMELY challenging for me...one unit in Fulfulde is actually 5...so when you say "ten" in Fulfulde, you are saying "50 francs"...I hope to be able to say the correct amounts and not make too many mistakes!

Thanks for joining us as we live and work here in Niger...we couldn't be here without your support and prayers!!