It has been a long time since I blogged ... the internet has been up and down lately and posting pictures is a challenge, but today, I am going to give it a try! As it has been a few months - there are so many stories to catch up on!! I have seen and have had a lot of new cultural experiences during the rainy season.
This year, the village area created a "cow camp" .... basically, they left about 2 square kilometres of field land fallow - for use as grazing land instead of planting millet this year.
Then, young shepherds from five village areas set up camp for the four months of rainy season and the cows, sheep, and goats wandered around eating the grass and depositing their manure for the upcoming year.
As I've not seen this done since I arrived in 2008, I was naturally curious - "how often do you do this?", I asked the village chief's son. He said it had been a long time, maybe 10 years since this had last been done. My road out to the village traverses the grazing land - so every time I went to the village, I would wave to the young shepherds and often had to weave my way through the flocks and herds which were resting on the road!
I stopped to chat with them one day and take their picture. The sticks that they are holding are the traditional Fulani shepherd stick!
Mostly, from what I understood, they live on the milk from the cows that they drink each day. Perhaps sometimes food is delivered as well.
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