How much protein do you get from eating baby bees?

I can’t believe that so much time has passed since I last wrote. I keep getting stalled, busy on projects. But I’m constantly thinking: I should update my life.

First, let me apologize that there are no photographs for you to look at. I spent several hours last week compiling snapshots from the past month but immediately afterward my laptop crashed. It still isn't fixed but I wanted to write something anyway. No pictures is worth the following one million words.

Today is the fourth day of a cramped belly, aching bones, desperate lunges to the toilet. I’m in the med unit taking doses of antibiotics for the dysentery I’ve been suffering through. My body goes through cycles of shivering cold that makes my stomach cramp and my lungs seize followed by bouts of feverish sweating that causes drops of water to drip from my pale, pasty flesh. Sounds dramatic. Yesterday’s attempt to drink a glass of water resulted in projectile vomiting. I’ve fouled my underwear more times than I care to recollect.

But I should say that I’m finally getting better. The Ciprofoxacin is killing the bacteria that made their home in my gut. I haven’t eaten anything for days so there’s hardly anything in my stomach to give me trouble. But when you’re sick like that, days go by like months and I can hardly remember staggering into the med unit covered in sweat, my face hanging off my head. Tammy says that I’m hilarious in my delirious yammering.

Before this, I was living for a few days at the nicest hotel in The Gambia: The five star Sheraton on the coast across from Ghanatown. We had our semi-annual All-Volunteer meeting where the Peace Corps Administration told us all how valuable we are, what we should improve upon, and how the new budget from Washington still doesn’t begin to cover our expenses. But going from grass mattresses to cloud-like pillows, bucket-baths to hot showers in glass enclosed bathrooms, the prickly heat of humid rainy-season Gambia to air-conditioned rooms with iced sodas will make anyone feel valued. Buffet dinners, pool-side beverages, ocean breezes.

I spent nearly the last two months on trek conducting the Feed the Minds sponsored “Freebee” training. It was truly a rewarding experience and I enjoyed the opportunities to work with beekeepers all over The Gambia. Many of the people we contacted were inexperienced but interested in learning about beekeeping. Others though had a lot to teach me. It gave me the chance to harvest from grass hives, log hives, and hives made from broken pounding bowls. I got to observe the difference in honey production from different regions here. Some places are densely forested with silk cottons and cashews while others are open savanna with a few baobab trees. Some colonies were old and some brand new.

I travelled with three of my Gambian counterparts- Karamu, Kaddy, and Gibril- and my very capable Bambara driver Abdoulie (who I once watched melt a broken car battery terminal over an open fire and then pour it into a mud mold to repair the one that had broken in our truck). We returned to all the villages we went to last autumn to see what people had been up to. On the first trek we had taught people how to weave grass hives and encouraged them to place them in areas where bee-fodder was available. This time we brought protective gear with us and took the participants out into the bush to inspect the colonies and to harvest honey. Sometimes the participants had built Kenyan Top-Bar hives (KTBs) or grass hives that we could spend time around demonstrating proper management techniques. For almost all of the people, this was the first time that they had really had the chance to inspect inside a hive. Even experienced honey hunters in The Gambia work in harried and quick-paced sessions with too much smoke on moonless nights due to their lack of protective gear.

We were able to take the time to show the difference between brood comb and honey comb, between capped and un-ripened honey. We are trying to teach people that the quality of honey will affect the price they can set and that by taking only the best capped honey they can make more money. Honey-hunting in The Gambia is traditionally done by men and older boys because of the associated dangers of wandering in the bush at night and the accompanying stings of harvesting. But we were able to convince several women to come with us and wear the veiled garments and rubber boots. It was especially rewarding to see the women get the opportunity to work with us and several of them seemed quite inspired by the time we were finished.

For my own part, getting to work around so many different colonies was highly educational. At one site, nobody had had any luck attracting colonies but we wanted to have honey and wax for the second day when we would teach about processing. Someone mentioned some wild bees high up in a baobab tree a little ways from the village. That night we went to the bush and spotted the colony about forty feet up in a tree that must have been over two-hundred years old. We decided that I should go up. We found a homemade ladder that was rickety and poorly constructed with too much space between the rungs and about ten feet too short. We threw a rope over a branch just above the hole where the colony resided. The ladder was tied to the rope and lifted until it almost reached the colony. I was placed on a man’s shoulders and lifted up to the ladder that was spinning and dangling from the rope. Of course being enshrouded in my beesuit, gloves, and rubber boots made me even more awkward than I would normally be clinging to a swaying ladder in the dark with angry bees circling me, sweat blinding me, and fear pounding through my veins.

From the man’s shoulders I reached high and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder and pulled myself up. The baobab was all I could see because of the hooded veil. I hung there for a moment gathering strength and then slowly pulled myself up. Once I stood on the bottom rung I breathed deeply to try to calm down. I was scared of falling. There were at least twenty people gathered around below, the colony was still so far above me, and my heart was pounding out of my chest. I reached up to the next rung and pulled myself up. And again. The wind was blowing and my own movements were causing the ladder to swim around; banging into the tree and then thrusting away into the dark. Flashlights bounced around like klieg lights and a bon fire gave the forest a weird glow. I pulled myself up to the next level and then the next. My arms were weak and shaking, the rubber gloves filled with sweat, the ladder to and fro. Finally I reached the top rung but realized that it was too low. I’d have to stand on it and wrap my arm around the rope that I was dangling from to reach the hive. I pulled on the other rope which brought my bucket and smoker up to me. The bees were aggressive; the hive at eye level was huge and probably had never been harvested. It was quite a trick to keep one hand wrapped around the rope while I used the other to pump smoke into the hive. The bees smeared on my veil and the smoke in my eyes all but blotted out the night. For one brief moment I was able to look around at the night: Stars through the sparse limbs of the baobab, a sleight breeze, people below illuminated by the fire they’d built. My fear of falling subsided. I knew that this is what I had come here to do. I was doing something different; trying something that tested my physical and emotional strength. Though I had been stung a few times through my suit and could feel the burn, I felt strong and clear. I tried to cut comb away with my hive tool until I fumbled it and dropped it onto the head of one of the men below. Without it, I just grabbed at comb with my hand and lumped it into my bucket. Eventually I reached brood comb and stopped harvesting. I lowered the bucket down and then slowly brought myself back down the ladder. By the time my quivering body hit the ground, half the bucket of honey had been eaten.

On that trip I also did a few other things I had not yet done here. I harvested honey from wild bees who had built their hive in an abandoned termite mound. I inspected colonies hived in water jugs and baskets wrapped with rice bags. I learned bee-terminology in Mandinka, Serehule, and Wolof. At a water pump in a Fula village I found a small swarm that had probably lost their home in a nearby bush fire. They were clustered on the wet concrete at risk of being drownded and were remarkably docile- a result of being engorged with honey for their escape and most likely exhausted. The people pumping water thought this Tubob was insane as I reached my naked hand into the cluster of bees and gently moved them around until I found the queen. I lifted her and cupped her in my hand but she took flight. It took several minutes of frantic searching before I found her again floating in a bucket of water. I fished her out and Karamu helped me clip her wings. We returned her to the cluster until later that night when we married that small colony with a larger one that we were re-housing from a pounding bowl in the village to a KTB in the bush. I also finally ate some brood which is considered a delicacy that gives men their "strength." The raw brood straight from the comb is salty and too watery to be appetizing but I rather enjoyed the satisfying pop in the mouth of the cooked ones.

All in all, the “Freebee” training should be considered a success because we contacted so many people in the rural areas and taught many aspects of beekeeping. Men, women, and children attended the trainings and some seemed genuinely interested in getting involved. A few months ago, I wondered if we would even get the chance to work on the project because of budgetary and administration problems. And we finished just before the first rains fell in The Gambia.

Aside from that, I’ve been working on getting to know my new community. It hasn’t been easy since I’ve been away so much. Gunjur is pleasantly large and I am able to maintain a certain anonymity there that was impossible in my old village. For some, Peace Corps is all about integrating into a community and developing a strong relationship with their host family. For me, having come here as someone who hasn’t really set-root in any particular place and who left home almost 20 years ago, the desire to bond has never really been there. I am more comfortable roaming. I enjoy that my new guardians treat me more like a renter than a family member. Sometimes, if I were away from my old village for too long I would have to give small gifts and explanations to many people who wanted to know where I had been and why I was away so long. Now, I don’t feel so guilty if my work keeps me in Kombo or on the move elsewhere in The Gambia.

It’s not that I don’t miss being in Chewel because sometimes I do. The pace there was nice, the environment great for running in the bush or cycling, and I miss my friends there. It’s farming season and I remember fondly last year’s tiring days hunched under the sun weeding fields of rice, millet, and groundnut. I wonder whatever became of my biochar pit. And sadly, because of the All-Vol, I had to miss the wedding of Landing and Fatou, both dear friends who had taken good care of me while I lived in Manneh Kunda. My new home is more like an apartment and the back yard is a concrete slab. I'm away from home too often to even think about planting a garden and I have yet to find a place to put my compost pit.

But there is still plenty of work to keep me busy. The remainder of my service will be spent mostly on beekeeping related projects and helping with the Training for the group of Volunteers that will replace my cohort. They arrive in November. Three of my fellow Volunteers and I are shooting agroforestry training videos to be posted on YouTube and distributed to Peace Corps Volunteers. We've completed four of them thus far using the low-tech gadgetry available here. We've made videos about composting, garden bed preparation, transplanting, and organic pesticides. I'm also the co-editor and tireless contributing writer for our newsletter Natanial Fatty's Miracle Almanac which keeps me busy coming up with joke horoscopes and fake interviews. I am writing a new manual for Gambian beekeeping based on what I’ve been privileged to observe and experience here. I'm also working with some good folks who are trying to establish a non-profit venture here called BeeCause which is a three-tiered initiative directed towards people living in poverty. I'm sure you'll read more about that as time goes on. Finally, Tammy and I are planning a backpacking trip to Cape Verde.

Personal failure: The Hundred Push-Up Challenge. A couple of months ago, a few friends and I found this website that guarantees that you can do 100 push-ups without stopping if you follow the six week plan. Twenty-eight of us signed up in our own informal challenge. Of course, the author of that program failed to consider what affect a protein-poor diet might have on the push-uppers. How much protein do you get from eating baby bees?

Every other day I pushed-up until I collapsed- almost bloodying my nose a few times. Some days I did as many as 175 push ups in half an hour. Not bad considering that in my initial test I maxxed-out at 39 in a row. At the six week mark I did a progress test to see how close to 100 I could do. Ceremoniously I dropped to the prayer mat spread on the floor of my new house. I started strong and wasn't even sweating when I passed number 39. At 45 though my ears started ringing. Number 47 found me leaving either a pool of sweat or tears on the mat below my face. I couldn't tell which because I was "in the zone." I collapsed at 49.

As far as I know, only one of my fellow participants has actually completed the Hundred Push-Up Challenge. If I ever get my appetite back, I plan to try again.

My doctor just came into the room and told me that I am looking better but that she wants me to stay for at least a few more days to give my body a little rest. I told her that I really wanted to get back to work. She replied that the most important aspect of Peace Corps is the cultural exchange and that the work that we do here is a distant second. For me, learning about The Gambia has been an incredibly rewarding experience and having good relationships with my counterparts and friends here has made me feel like my service has been successful. It’s winding down. I’m thinking more and more about leaving and my Close of Service conference (also at the Sheraton thanks to off-season rates) is next month already. While I am fairly confident that I will push my leave date from December to April so I can complete a few things, I know that the end is coming. Having had the rural village experience for most of my time here and now a more urban one, I feel like I am getting to know this place fairly well. And with so much traveling, I now have a fairly broad perspective about The Gambia’s culture and environment. She’s right; the cultural exchange is certainly the most enduring aspect of Peace Corps service.

Throbbing Thumbs and Dead Ducks

So I got this blister on my thumb. It happened while helping my host brother Landing thresh the groundnuts that he harvested while I was in Guinea.

Groundnuts are brought from the field on donkey carts and then piled in a place well-protected from hungry livestock who love the hay. The plants dry in the sun for a few days and then they are beaten with bamboo canes until the nuts fall from the roots.


The hay is stacked and will be sold to local herdsmen who will feed it to their livestock as the dry season makes wild plants unavailable. Groundnut hay is of higher monetary value than the nuts.


Threshing can only be done during the warmest part of the day when the sun is shining very hot. One bamboo cane is used for lifting the plants while the other is for beating. You can kick them a little to separate them. Landing said that I would soon be "qualified." I made twelve blisters on my palms and three on my thumbs. The one on the right thumb became infected. Maybe a splinter went in or possibly germs and weebeasties. My doctor from Sierra Leone told me that.

Groundnuts can also be harvested by hand. My host father loves groundnuts. One of my favorite things about groundnut harvesting season: While the legumes are still attached to the roots, the dry plants can be set ablaze.

Once the plants are burned, we sit in the dirt and eat roasted nuts until our teeth are blackened.



Harvesting is happening everywhere these days. The cool season is upon us and people are staying very busy. My rice field produced a nice harvest. From the four kilos we planted, we harvested almost thirty five which is a great return. We didn't even use fertilizer.

The rice is cut from the grass and then brought back to the village in bundles carried on the head.
My friend Malang Manjang is an exceptional farmer. He planted fields of millet, corn, beans, sorghum, and sesame this year. The sesame plants produce beautiful flowers.

Most of the folks I loaned rice to returned it to me once they harvested. Now I have over 100 kilos and I will save about fifty for planting next year.


I also have been harvesting other crops. I tried planting mung beans and had a decent harvest. Remember when I first started A Growing Sense and wanted to become Duke City's King of Sprouts? I bought mung beans and let them grow for two or three days and then sold them at farmer's markets. People loved them.

I also have been experimenting with growing a few other things. Tomatoes are much loved here but wilts, blights, mosaics, and nematodes usually destroy the plants before they can produce fruit. I heard that tomatoes can be grafted to eggplants which do not suffer from such problems.

But I don't really know if the plants will produce fruit. We'll wait and see.

I've been spending a lot of time at the NBAG apiary in Nyambai.


We are trying to correct the bees tendency to build combs across the top-bars rather than one on each. The cross-combing is a big problem here.
The process we are developing involves cutting the combs off of the bars.

And then tying them on to individual bars. We have switched to wire instead of cloth because the bees accept it more readily.



I went on an overnight boat ride on the Bintang Bolong. This is a small tributary of the River Gambia that is located near my home.
Tim, Jeff, Alex, and I borrowed dug out canoes called pirogues from local fishermen and set out.

I let Jeff paddle me because my thumb was throbbing. It was still just a blister at this point but I was becoming a little worried. It was painful and had swelled to twice the size of the other.

But the river was calm and very pretty. We had a relaxing time watching birds and listening to river sounds. There were pelicans and king fishers and hawks.


Because of its proximity to the Atlantic, the Bintang Bolong is tidal. When we started out we went around in circles because we were paddling against the flow. The pirogues are made from carved trees and tend to be a little wonkity in the river. Maybe it is just us: Gambians stand in them and throw nets and seem to do just fine. Jeff and I caused our boat to capsize while bailing water out with a small cup. We flooded and sank. The current was fast and we struggled to pull the canoe to shore. Jeff pulled at the boat and swam while I kept hold of our bags and the twenty liter bidong of fresh water we had for the overnight trip. It took about ten minutes to get everything to shore. Jeff's fishing pole sunk and I watched my camera in its plastic case float away. I ran down the beach cutting my feet on shells while stripping my heavy, soaked clothes to get ahead of it. I jumped in and swam out and saved it from the fast current. The case was water-tight and so the camera still works. It makes pictures like this one.

We camped on a serene little beach where we drank wine and ate canned meat. The next day we caught the tide and floated home.

When I arrived in my village I found that my duck had died.


I was saving that one for my parents' visit next week but now they will just have to have monkey meat, scrawny chickens, and billy goat. Also, my headlamp got wet when we capsized and the salt water ruined it. I had had that light for years and it has illuminated many New Mexican cacti and Arizonan coyotes and Gambian fruitbats. Now the only light I have by which to read at night is this locally-bought pen-light on the end of a disposable lighter. For some reason though, it casts an image of Saddam Husein which is discomforting to read by.


My thumb had continued to get worse. The blister began to ripen and turn black. I could feel my heart pumping like it wanted to explode the tip off. The pain was all the way to my elbow. I was scheduled to help train the new Volunteers who were at Tendaba Camp in Kiang. I rode my bike there and expected to find the Peace Corps nurse but she was still two days away. I called her and she started me on antibiotics and recommended hot water soaks.

The thing about helping with the Training is that it takes you full circle. These kids are where I was one year ago and it brought my service into perspective. I have learned a lot here and was happy to share some of that wisdom with these fresh faced (no sun-wrinkles) and idealistic (not jaded by the realities of development work) kids. It also gave me a chance to see how the tourist art at Tendaba Camp has transformed.
Above is the mural from November 2007 while below is the bustier one there now.


The nurse arrived at Tendaba and was quite impressed with my blister. Although I had already lanced it once with a sewing needle, she gave it another shot using a syringe. Unfortunately, it was unproductive as the pus was too thick to be aspirated in such a fashion. Also, it hurted.

We went back to Kombo and on Thanksgiving morning the darn thing was ripe as a plum and burning like hell-fire.

The nurse called the doctor. He works for the United Nations and so doesn't need the day off. He doesn't really care about pilgrims and cornucopias and turkeys. He thought that maybe there was some sort of foreign body in there like maybe a splinter from a bamboo cane or some bacteria from eating groundnuts that had been cooked in the dirt. Anyway, why not cut it open?



So that's what he did.

Getting whatever was in there out of there sure felt better. Now I'm healing.



Also, that mustache looked stupid and so I shaved it.

Guinea Take Me Away

I’m back from village for a few days in Kombo but I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Guinea. This will be my first real vacation since coming here unless you count Dakar which was more of an extended weekend. I will be gone for a week. I’m going with several Peace Corps friends, some of whom came when I did and a few who have been here longer. Tara, Ted, Mai, Natasha, Tyler, Cassandra, and Alex. We will leave from Kombo tomorrow morning, cross the River Gambia at Barra, and then take overland transport for about nine hours to Basse. From there we will begin the thirty hour overland trek through Senegal and into Guinea. We want to stay in a small village near Labe’ where we are told that we can wander through mountain ranges and swim in waterfalls. Many Volunteers from here have gone there and it is highly recommended.


We will be there for a week and then I will be back to work. I’m going to conduct a few beekeeping trainings on my trek back to Barra from Basse on the North Bank. The National Beekeeper’s Association of The Gambia (NBAG) was awarded a grant from a UK based charity called Feed the Minds with which we are trying to reach 400 rural people to encourage beekeeping. We want to stress the advantages of traditional methods while promoting modern management techniques. We will discuss the woven grass hive and the wooden Kenyan Top Bar (KTB) hive, talk about pests and diseases, and demonstrate honey harvesting and wax rendering. We will make three such visits to each training site over the course of the next nine months so that we can focus on seasonal training. The first classes will talk about baiting hives and apiary locations, the second will focus on harvesting honey and managing brood, the third will look at project development and advanced methods.


I have also spent a fair amount of time these past few weeks working with bees at the NBAG apiary near Brikama. There we have about twenty colonies which are giving us a lot of opportunities to learn and to develop our management strategy. We have baited several hives with beeswax to attract colonies. The technique we use is to run a thin bead of melted wax along the center of about half of the top bars in a KTB. Field bees from feral colonies find these baited hives and when they swarm (anytime between September and January in The Gambia) hopefully they will relocate to our apiary. This method of “bait and wait” is a very popular way to colonize hives here. I do not know anyone who is involved in queen rearing or hive splitting and so I am exploring these methods as part of my primary work at NBAG. If we can develop a method that improves beekeepers’ access to bees, we can begin to really promote sustainable beekeeping here.


One problem that we have with our KTB hives here is that bees do not understand our management strategy. Though we would like them to build one comb per top bar so that we can manage each comb individually, they rarely do this. Often they” cross-comb” so that combs are positioned diagonally and are therefore attached to three or four top bars. This makes brood management and honey harvest very difficult and creates a major obstacle for proactive beekeeping. We are developing a technique of cutting the comb from top bars and then repositioning it onto each individual top bar using narrow gauge wire. We tried cloth strips but found that bees didn’t like the intrusion of that material and would abandon entire combs. The wire method has been more successful and if it continues to work we will incorporate the strategy into our rural training modules.


Back in village, it is harvest-time. We ended up having much too much rain this year and so our maize crops were almost a complete failure. Gambians look forward all of hungry-season to the first ears roasted on open fires but sadly this year gave us few opportunities to enjoy that night-time treat. On the flipside though, the rain was great for our rice, millet, sorghum, and groundnut crops. Last year my host family brought in about 19 bundles of millet while this year we have 31and are still harvesting. The Nerica rice that I planted looks terrific and I expect a good harvest in another two weeks or so. I planted about four kilos and will harvest probably 25-30 which I will save as next year’s seed.


But looking at the crops around my village has keyed me in on something that I cannot hide from. The last few years have been unseasonably dry and so people have blamed crop failures on the lack of precipitation. But this year saw plenty of rain and still crops haven’t yielded as much as we had hoped. Subsistence farmers here have limited time to grow enough food for the entire year plus we should be able to put away enough for seed Many plants are stunted and yield is low across the country. The soils are depleted and it is difficult to do anything about it. Chemical fertilizer is transient in the soil and expensive and so does not provide a sustainable solution to fertility issues. Fallowing is easier said than done: For fallowing to work, land has to be uncultivated for up to twenty years but people are unable to rotate fields to such a degree that this would be possible. Agroforestry techniques such as alley cropping and green manure crops take a long time to be successful, require protection from grazing animals, and often need supplemental care to get them through the dry season. I cannot see how to make enough compost to improve the soil of these huge fields.


One technique that I am experimenting with at my village is the use of bio-char as a soil amendment. Basically, bio-char is slash from trees and crop residues (millet stalks, rice hulls, and groundnut shells) burnt in a reduced oxygen environment to create a fine-grained charred substance that retains up to 50% of the pre-burn biomass. It is made similarly to charcoal production but that practice is illegal in The Gambia. The law aside, many people have clandestine charcoal operations in the bush around my village. The technique, called pyrolysis, involves stacking biomass, covering it with soil, and then setting it afire. It smolders for several weeks until the charcoal-makers uncover it and then sell the fist-sized pieces on the open-market for low-smoke cooking purposes. They leave behind a large pile of fine-grained charred substance that I scavenge from the bush and take to my demonstration garden in my village. I add it to my compost or put it directly into garden soils.


Bio-char produces long-lasting results that can be present in the soil for thousands of years. The burned biomass increases potassium (the K in NPK) and stabilizes nitrogen (the N) to prevent leaching. It improves soil tilth and increases microbial populations. The bio-char creates a habitat where wee-beasties can thrive by increasing humidity and improving soil respiration. The addition of bio-char to the earth provides the carbon component of the micro-organisms’ diet with the added benefit of being not rapidly consumed. In field studies, where bio-char is combined with either organic or inorganic fertilizers, the vegetative growth and grain production was significantly improved over plots where NPK was used without bio-char.


So, as you can see, I am staying busy here. I really love the work that I do and enjoy the place where I do it. I have approached the country director for PCTG about applying for an extension of my service. He was enthusiastic but told me that budget-cuts within Peace Corps have made such extensions difficult. The new rules are that the Volunteer can only apply for an extension on the same continent as he is already serving and that to be considered he has to be willing to serve for an additional two years. Previously if a Volunteer extended she could serve for one additional year and could go to almost any country for which she was qualified. Still, I want to look at my options and will write my letter of intention when I return from Guinea so that my CD can begin the paperwork.


Another thing that has kept me busy is planning for my parents’ trip to The Gambia. They will be coming for two weeks in December. I salute them. Many Volunteers have told me that their families have expressed no interest in coming to visit. Sure, things here are tough, but I think we will have a terrific time. We will spend some time in Dakar before coming to The Gambia. Here, we plan to relax along the beach in Sanyang, visit my village up-country, and perhaps take a boat trip out to a small island where there is a chimpanzee rehabilitation program.


Let me take this opportunity to apologize that this blog post has no photographs. I left my digital camera at site. I was so distracted with wrapping-up projects and packing for the next three weeks away from village that I forgot that my camera was in my bike-bag where it still resides. Funny thing though: When I packed my bag for Guinea I decided that I would take my 35mm SLR camera with me because I want to get back into taking high-quality film pictures instead of the point-and-shoot type that I have been taking since coming here. So I will. Don’t fret though, there will be plenty of digital cameras on this trip and so I will try to post some of the pictures that my traveling companions take on my next blog.


Sorry also that this blog is so technical. I hope that it is not boring to read about the work that I’m doing. Usually I try to be entertaining in these missives but I’ve been so busy that I don’t really have funny little anecdotes about life here. No snakes this time. In addition to all the work that I mentioned above, I have written two long articles for our AgFo newsletter, worked on writing a grant to the UNDP for my queen-rearing program, updated our beekeeping manual, and started to prepare for the technical training of the new trainees that arrive here next month. All this said, Guinea Take Me Away.


Talk to you when I get back. I hope that you have peace.