Letter to Joy and Mark (January 14)

Hey guys! How's it going? Hopefully you had a great holiday season. Did you meet up with any ISC members/alumni? Nonetheless, I hope you had a great time wherever and whatever you did.

How's your winter shaping up? Heard it's unseasonably warm (surprise...global warming). Hopefully it didn't take away from your enjoyment of the weather. Here, surprise, it was actually colder than it was last year. Odd, but true, and it's not because of the reasons you think.

Each year, in Dec/Jan the Harmattan winds blow down south from the Sahelian region of Burkina, the north. The winds are very strong and bring a ton of dust, causing visibility to sometimes go down as far as 1/4 mile here (sometimes 50ft - 25ft up north). Anyway, besides obscuring everything on the ground, the wind-provided dust obsures the sun and moon. Thus reducing the sun-induced ground heat quite a lot. The Sahel is the bordering area between the Sahara Desert and the temperate grasslands. For the last 30 years much of the Sahel has been severely deforested and is turning into more of the desert. The same winds are able to pick up more dust, because there's no trees to hold it down, and carry down to us and below. Thus our "cold" winter is inversely caused by the same effects that help global warming. Fun fact for you. Good times. :(

The Sahel region has just become a major target for funding by many ONGs (oops, sorry, NGOs) to help fight deforestation. They realize the major effects environmentally the deforestation has already caused. Some NGOs think it's too late for the Sahel and are trying to prevent our region from becoming the "New Sahel." Unfortunately, from talking to many of the older villagers, they say it already is. Twenty years ago, the Sahel used to look like our region as it does today. Our region was a solid forest of trees and grasslands then. Now it's a sparse intermixed forest with fields intermixed amongst the trees. Not much of the original forest land remains. The population has risen too much to *not* farm the land anymore. The tipping point will be when the trees are gone, the soil is depleted, and the population has no further place to go but Ghana. That should happen in the next 20 years unless local people honestly start replacing trees with responsibility.

The general response I get is, "it's not that serious of a problem yet. The people won't plant trees unless they can make money off it, like mangoes. So don't even try." It's a frustrating task. But, the sad thing is that general apathy is global. I sometimes think people are more curious to see how bad it can get before they *have* to do something. Oh, well. Another perky letter from your friendly neighborhood PCV.

That's enough gloom and doom from me. Take care and hope to see you soon.

Always, Laura