Today is a holiday in CAR but I am not celebrating. Today marks the 2003 anniversary of the current president coming to power through a somewhat bloody coup d’etat. Not something I would think of celebrating myself. Condemn, yes. Celebrate, no. So while everyone else is downtown watching the parade and worried that if they don’t show up they will be considered as an opponent to the current regime, I am taking my chances at home. Besides, I can’t see much that the current regime has accomplished since seizing power in 2003, unless you count five rebellions, astonishingly high rates of malnutrition and displaced people as accomplishments.
On the upside, my surrogate family is well and sends their greetings. The children in school this year are doing well and Clarisse’s youngest has started junior high school. She walks nearly 8 kilometres a day going to and from school but she is excelling and for that I am grateful. The nutrition garden is living up to its name, helping hundreds over the past year alone and is full of green leafy vegetables at present. Yesterday I helped dig holes for planting tropical yam: A task made easier by a sudden burst of rain, marking the coming of the rainy season.
Friday I hope to make it to Berberati to visit the other half of my surrogate family and spend some time with Clarisse. The following week I will be hosting a former ECHO intern who will be spending two weeks with me to learn about grafting and nursery management in the Central African context before she goes to spend two years in Cameroon doing something similar to the agroforestry work we have been doing here. I am looking forward to her arrival as I love training and am excited that Richard, the grafter I trained several years back, will be able to take a training role as well. His grafting has come along well and he has done some interesting experiments.
