It was painful—our introduction to African honey harvesting. One night in a national forest outside Dakar, my wife Paula Hirschoff and I donned the white bee suits that we’d brought from the States for our service as Peace Corps volunteers in Senegal. Our host, beekeeper Alain Vautier, remarked that white was a poor color choice—it would attract bees in the dark. Americans harvest honey in the sunshine, when white makes perfect sense.
As the crew smoked out the first hive, thousands of furious bees lit on our suits. In our finest, industrial-strength, made-in-America bee gear, we did not flinch. Paula and I are returned Peace Corps volunteers: each of us served decades ago—me in Nepal, she in Kenya. In retirement, we decided to re-enlist and follow our dreams to Africa. We felt well prepared, confident that we could handle life in a developing country.
At the hives, we grew uneasy. Bees seemed to be crawling inside my mask. Paula thought she felt something crawling, too, but kept quiet because she had faith in her fine white suit.
Moments later, bees started stinging us in the face. We started to flee—a futile effort because the bee-filled masks came right along with us. Once we had run far from the hives, our beekeeper friends helped us disrobe. I was stung on my lip and Adam’s apple and beneath my eye.
African bees are slightly smaller than their North American counterparts and far more ferocious. The zipper attaching the hood to the rest of our outfits ended just beneath the chin, where it was covered with a Velcro flap. There, through a tiny gap, the African bees had entered. We stuffed sponges into the tops of the zippers to prevent further intrusions.
We resisted going back to the hives. But our friend chided us. If we didn’t return, bee phobia might haunt us for the rest of our lives. So we went back to help lift out frames of honeycomb as thousands of bees—60,000 per hive—buzzed and whirled around us. It was an edgy labor.
By the end of the harvest—with 25 pounds of honey in hand—it was midnight. As we drove to the honey processing plant, the beekeeper’s apprentice reached into the back of the car and handed us slabs of honeycomb dripping with the most delectable honey we’d ever tasted. We bit off chunks and munched out all the sweetness, spitting beeswax out the car window. By morning, the right side of my face had swollen grotesquely—but we had a great tale about our nighttime escapade in the forest.
There’s no keeping our encounter with the bees from becoming a metaphor about Peace Corps service. Development work is always difficult, no matter how prepared you are. Every challenge is intensely local; you can’t simply import technology and expect it to work at your site. The approach that local folks use often has a rationale that outsiders don’t understand. You need to expect to get “stung” and to experience many disappointments, along with a few sweet surprises.
As we settle into life in Guinguinéo, a small town in the scrubland of west central Senegal, I’m gaining other insights into how the developing world has changed and how I as a volunteer am different now from the volunteer I was during my initial Peace Corps tenure.
In Nepal, a kingdom in the heart of the Himalayas, I was profoundly isolated. Few of my villagers had met a Westerner and they laughed when I tried to tell them that humans had just landed on the moon. I hiked 32 miles round-trip to get my mail. With no television, radio or newspapers, no villager knew that people elsewhere in the world enjoyed a higher standard of living.
Now, nearly 40 years later, everyone is connected to everyone else. Like much of the developing world today, Senegal is intensely engaged with the West. Many Senegalese emulate the French and long to emigrate to Europe or America. Many folks have access to cell phones, and a national television channel airs soap operas and World Cup matches. The communications revolution has allowed all to know in painful detail how poor they are. This knowledge can eat at their minds and create desperation.
Modern communications also keep Americans better informed about the developing world, although the news mostly emphasizes the negative. Westerners are fed a constant diet of “hunger porn”—graphic scenes of famine, civil war and AIDS victims. In the decades between my two terms of service, Americans have lost their innocent optimism that national independence and development assistance would transform the lives of Third World peoples.
The worst result of the engagement with the West is a pervasive belief—at least from what we’ve seen among the Senegalese—that infusions of capital are the easy path to development. “Donnez-moi xaalis (give me money)” is a repeated refrain in the streets, a demand never heard before nongovernmental organizations descended on the developing world. Our response to the pessimism and culture of dependence is to focus on what we can accomplish day to day with an emphasis on local resources.
The West has an insatiable appetite for material goods: it’s maddening that we have so much when the Senegalese often want for the basics. But our American insatiability can be positive when it comes to our thirst for innovation. In a 33-year career in public policy, I came to believe that innovation was the driving force behind America’s economic might. So innovation is the approach I’m trying to stress in my Peace Corps work.
Starting with fruit drying. During the rainy season, sweet juicy mangoes are so abundant that thousands rot on the ground. I designed a solar food dryer and challenged five local women to team up to dry mangoes. Together, we’re learning how to select for ripeness, to coat the slices with ascorbic acid to preserve the orange color, to protect the fruit from insects, and to market (with lots of free samples) a product never seen here before.
Senegal is certainly more open to innovation these days than Nepal was 35 years ago. As an agricultural extension agent in Nepal, I peddled the then-new “Green Revolution” rice, wheat and corn. When the demonstration crops generated 20 to 40 times more than the local varieties, the farmers concluded, “Chuck ji, you’re a good farmer.” End of analysis. The farmers were unprepared for change, experimentation, trial-and-error or risk-taking.
It’s easy to understand why farmers in the developing world are conservative: they live with the constant threat of infestations, drought and other devastation leading to hunger and famine. For four months last spring, our region in Senegal experienced a massive invasion of millions of four-inch crickets that devoured every leaf, fruit and flower in sight. When there was nothing left to eat, they disappeared. People here fear they’ll return before harvest of the rainy-season crops (millet, corn and sorghum). Innovation can lead to profits and higher yields, but it also can fail and leave them desperate. Thus, they are reluctant to try new approaches.
My understanding of this point of view enables me to be patient with the day-to-day results of my efforts as an agricultural extension agent. I know that development is a long-term effort. When Paula and I returned to my Nepal village in 1998, we found not only that the villagers remembered and warmly welcomed me, but that the farmers were all using the high-yield seed varieties that I had demonstrated 35 years earlier.
It’s been a pleasant surprise to learn that in Senegal, I can accomplish more in months than I did in two years in Nepal. To combat heat and seasonal drought, I’ve been introducing drip irrigation systems, water-absorbing polymers that can be incorporated into the soil, and drought-resistant seeds. I’m ready with lessons in arid farming that come from the Pueblo Indians. In an area where the soil is often too warm for seed germination, I’m experimenting with pépinières (nurseries) planted in earthen jars covered with wet cloth and straw, and pre-germinating seeds in water-soaked cloth. It’s a pleasure to share the results of these experiments with local gardeners—and to believe that this work can have lasting impact.
