I just got back from a 3-day training in Battambang to learn all about school gardening! Despite doing a basketball court as my grant project, I had immense luck to be able to attend the garden training with 10 other volunteers because I am on the grants committee! Since I help review Small Project Assistance Grants (SPA), I got to attend. I also did take a lot of photos for the committee, so I was doing media and also learning! All of the other volunteers came to the training with a counterpart, school director, or co-teacher from their school. This is because Peace Corps' main goals are focused on sustainability and capacity building. Volunteers are only temporary in their towns, and do aid in the purchasing and construction of these grant projects, but their Khmer counterparts will be the one to take care of the garden for years to come. So PCVs
come to the training, but in reality it is intended for the counterparts to learn techniques and also share with their communities at large.
If you know me, you know I have never been a gardener. But there is always a first time for everything, because I learned so much! This training was conducted in partnership with CE SAIN, which is an agricultural program supported by USAID. We spent the first day of the training touring the CE SAIN facility in Battambang and then learned in a classroom setting about some steps taken in gardening. The next two days, we went to a fellow PCV's school to then work on practicing those techniques that we learned. We learned how to design a garden, what type of plants should be inside a net house versus outside a net house, how to plant seedlings, how to prepare soil, how to make natural fertilizer, and how to make nutrient sprays and natural pesticides for planting plants. The training was mainly in Khmer (with English translations on the slides) but also there was some English translation. So it was a week of garden learning and also a week of language learning.
Center of Excellence on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and Nutrition (CE SAIN) Website: https://www.cesain.org/
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