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Yere Walo, Gorgol, Mauritania.
This kid, man. I spotted him pushing around a little contraption of two wheels attached to a stick and said something like, “did you make that? Thats not bad.” Ten minutes later he found me and brought me to his house to show me two other models he made. This one is fully steerable and had spare tires stored in a trunk that opened and closed. The other model was a pickup truck with a luggage rack on the roof.
Near Tikobra, Gorgol, Mauritania.
This is a typical scene from the Sahel. I tried to get closer to this guy but he was a little shy of my tripod.
Girbe, “waterskin”, near Tikobra, Mauritania.
A girbe is a goatskin filled with water that is hung as an offering to travelers throughout the Maghreb, they are pretty common and you can even find them next to houses in the streets of the capital. This particular girbe has been hung next to a river that has dried up from the drought. Normally, the small tributary behind the skin requires only a few inches of digging to find water. Now villagers walk the distance to tend to the skin to make sure that travelers and herders are taken care of.
Demi Lunes. Gorgol Region, Mauritania.
These half moons are an agricultural technique employed in arid environments to combat erosion and desertification. The ditches are dug on land that is on a slight incline. During the rainy season, the ditches trap nutrients from runoff and allow water to slowly soak into the soil.
Women’s collective vegetable garden in Tikobra. Gorgol Region, Mauritania.
Look at her feet, they’re wet!
Tikobra. Gorgol Region, Mauritania.
This is to provide a little more context about the environment and its susceptibility to drought. The Sahel has really poor soil, so what rain does fall erodes the land and leeches it of nutrients making agriculture tough. That is why this garden was really so impressive to me.
This is a 20 meter deep well funded by the Croix-Rouge français which feeds a women’s collective vegetable garden. This town deep in the Sahel, hours from the nearest road, and even in the midst of a drought and region-wide food crises, a simple well provides an amazing amount of fresh vegetables to this community. The solar panel is nice, but is not necessary and is not what I would consider “sustainable development”. A well at that depth could easily work with a mechanical pump or with buckets.
