DIY

I spend a lot of time wrestling with the balance between doing it myself and encouraging someone else to do it. Record keeping is a good example: whenever I visit a certified farmer I make it a habit to check their records to be sure they are keeping up and add any details they might have missed. The quality of records kept range from detailed daily entries to nothing for several months. When I come upon one of these blank books I have to make some choices about how to handle it. Originally (and this is still written in some of our internal documents, to my chagrin) me or another field officer were supposed to be available to help complete records for farmers that don’t read/write, but we pretty quickly realized that this was way too much to offer in terms of time, so it has been cut back to an offer to help fill the book in the time before or after monthly meetings. I’m pretty happy with that balance. Most farmers are able to fill the book themselves, or they have someone in their family to help write their work down, and for those who have neither they can see me or another person with Mocha Joes at least once a month.

I’ve written about compost before and how I want to be using compost tea as a strategy for controlling the coffee berry disease that is so destructive here, so you know that’s on my mind a lot, and recently I’ve been somewhat fixated on the idea of using soap as an insecticide. There are a few farmers who have compost piles now but the management is pretty shoddy and I want to get some good quality compost, so this past week I bit the bullet and went ahead and made myself a compost pile behind my house (previously I would give my scraps to a farmer who was keeping a decent pile). It’s a pretty makeshift affair, chicken wire for structure and bamboo for a base. The quantity of compostable material I produce isn’t large enough for me to make a free standing pile in a reasonable amount of time, so that’s why I went with the chicken wire cylinder. To increase the amount of material I talked to my neighbors about adding their own kitchen waste in exchange for some of the output. Their enthusiasm was surprising and gratifying and it already seems like the system will need to be expanded. So here’s hoping that in about 3-4 months I’ll have some good compost to make some nice tea.

Which soap is homemade? Hint: It doesn't look like soap.

So the compost is going pretty well. Finding insecticidal soap has been another issue. The stumbling block here is the vagueness of the US Organic standard and the difficulty in finding the ingredients in the locally available soaps. Soap is basically a fat or oil reacted with some kind of hydroxide (sodium hydroxide aka caustic lye is most common because it’s cheap); not too hard to make and it is not uncommon to find people who make their own soap in villages in Cameroon. I even have some instructions in a catalog of income generating activities some Peace Corps friends put together. After about two weeks of asking around it became apparent that there is no one in Oku currently making soap (though one lady tells me she plans to start again soon), so I figured I’d give it a go. Well there are two points the Peace Corps instructions I have don’t mention (and as a guy who has worked in science labs, I shouldn’t need to be told these things, but I totally bricked and never saw this coming). First, when caustic soda reacts with oil and water, it damn near explodes. Not like, kaboom explode, but lots of frothing and bubbling and very hot and caustic foam being sputtered everywhere and some pretty noxious gasses coming off at the same time. So that was a surprise for me and the friend I enlisted to help me. The other surprise was that you can NOT do this in an aluminum pot. Granted the instructions did say to use a bucket, but it didn’t say NOT to use a pot, so we had an extra clean pot and just opted to use it. Again, caustic soda is really reactive and will oxidize aluminum (apparently it is used in aluminum etching, who knew?), so our mixture never quite stopped bubbling all through the time we were making it and at the end it had a gnarly green color and gave us much less total soap than we expected. On the plus side the pot was really clean afterward. Lessons learned? When the instructions say use a bucket, use a bucket.