Re-use Increase Re-cycle

The use of water and plastic bags are two big issues in the Sahel, so I want to share my latest thoughts on ideas re-using both. Plastic bags seem to be on the ground everywhere in the Sahel. Especially on the edges of villages after a market day, the bags are blown all throughout the surrounding fields. I’ve recently learned about some interesting ideas of what to do with plastic bag waste here. In the capital, there’s a partnership with the government to melt plastic bags, add sand, and press the mixture into bricks that can pave roads. One of our colleagues who works with water and sanitation, is working on toilet molds with water traps to improve sanitation, which can be cheaply made out of this plastic bag and sand mixture. The mold is almost perfected, so it will be exciting to see the applications and accessibility that will be created! 

Next, some updates on our re-using water in our fish farming. A big thanksgiving is that we’ve sold almost all our initial fish! And we’ve had many happy customers. Now we just have a few left that we’re planning on using for a hatchery, which we'll be trained in next month. We also have another batch of 200 fish that are nearly ready to be sold. Unfortunately, we didn’t break even on the first batch of 500 fish because of the long time we kept the majority of them and the fish food we had to buy to maintain them. The bulk of our selling has been for major meetings or Christmas celebrations, but it has opened our eyes about what size of a batch of fish is realistic to sell at a time. We have also cut down on the numbers dying through sickness, with regular treatments, which had really changed our expected income. We knew this would be a learning process, so we’re not discouraged, but it’s given us a lot of ideas of how to improve it. The reusing of the water has been very interesting to local people as well, although we’ve been discovering that the small moringa garden we’ve been putting it on hasn’t been profitable yet either. Moringa is something you can get a good price for in the market, but we don’t have quite a critical mass to make it profitable. Hopefully our trees will become “bushier” and we can scale up that production going forward as well.

-- El Padre