Making the Most of Market Day

Heidi Isaza - Posted on November 17, 2008

In July we met Josephine, an energetic and happy woman who is also the mother of two sponsored children. Last time we spoke with her, she shared about the amount of work that Senegalese women must do in order to prepare the millet they harvest for their family’s consumption.

Today, Josephine is at the weekly Tattaguine market selling sweet bread made from the millet flour. Going to the market is not uncommon; having enough food to be able to sell some of it for money is.

Sunday mornings are a bustling day for the farmers who live in or around Tattaguine. From the early hours you can see people making preparations in family compounds and then making the trek from their plots of land to the central point.

This morning the “horse cart parking lot” around the central market area is full. Horses wait patiently, eating from food bags tied around their heads or grass left for them by their owners, while their masters make the rounds in the weekly market buying, selling or trading their goods.

Most of the people who live in this area of Senegal are subsistence farmers. They own small plots of land and what they grow during their rainy season, from July to October, is saved and used for their consumption during the rest of the year.

Josephine, a mother of two sponsored children, is one of the many women who have come to the market today to try to earn a little bit of money.

She, like many women and men, got up early this morning to prepare their goods for the market like they do on a regular basis.

“I come here every Sunday morning. I come early, at 8 a.m.,” she says.

Josephine comes early, not only to get her spot in one of the shady market stalls, but also to prepare her goods to be sold to her clients. This morning, she is selling “beignets” a kind of Senegalese sweet bread made from ground millet flour, formed into balls and then fried. These tasty “Senegalese doughnut holes” are then packaged into a packages of four, in plastic sandwich bags, and sold.

Josephine has had a pretty good day, so far. “I made four kilos of flour (the millet grains must first be ground by machine or by hand) to make this,” she says. At 1 p.m. she had sold half of what she brought and had a profit of $3.00. She figured that if she was able to sell the rest of what she prepared, she would be able to make $6.00.

Today, Josephine is selling products made of millet as that is what they are currently harvesting. Most farmers, however, do not sell their crops as they know they will need the reserves to eat during the dry season. This, however, is not the case for this family anymore.

Josephine and her husband, Pierre, have an advantage. Pierre is part of the Drip Irrigation Program, cosponsored by World Vision and Israeli Embassy. Now, not only will they be able to grow and sell their products during the traditional three month harvest season, but all year long.

“Because of the Drip Irrigation Program, we are able to grow more food,” she says.

Their family’s ability to grow more food not only helps saves them from hunger during the lean dry months, it also helps them have an excess that they can sell to earn money which they can then use to pay for school supplies or medical expenses.

“It was a very good thing to have the Drip Irrigation Program, because we can grow during the dry season as well,” she says.

Josephine smiles as she swats the flies away from the remaining sweat bread she is bagging for her customers. She and her daughter, Nicole, 7, who is helping her mom won’t go home until they sell the rest of their goods, which by the looks of things won’t be a problem. They are happy to have more than enough to eat—they even have enough to sell!

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