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their creased notebooks and listen at- tentively to the teacher until midday. They then take their plates and head for lunch. A huge pot of rice or millet will be cooking over a fire on the ground, flavored with seed oil, stock cubes and sometimes tomato concentrate. After the afternoon lessons, the children walk back home. From March to May, the temperature can reach 40−50°C (104−122°F), then come the rains, and finally between October and February a few months of milder weather.The school’s 350 pupils belong to a privileged minority that has the op- portunity to learn to read, write and do sums. Other Burkinabè children may never spend time at a school desk. The schoolchildren are lucky in other ways too. Nearby is a well with a work- ing manual pump: a precious resource in the semi-arid Sahel region running alongside the Sahara. They use the pump everyday, pushing down on a long lever, filling large cans and loading them onto a cart.As of this year, the school also has a small food garden. In November 2013 the headmaster took part in two days of training in Ouagadougou with the lo- cal Slow Food coordinators. Then, with the help of a small donation, the school bought wire fencing, a wheelbarrow, a spade, hoes and some watering cans. The fencing was used to mark out a rectangle of about 200 square meters, before the perimeter was further pro- tected with spiny branches: an essen- tial defense against goats. In this arid region, they do everything they can to enable tender shoots to sprout. Black plastic bags, blown by the wind, are constantly getting stuck in the fence. The children keep removing them, but they always come back. Unlike some other African countries (Rwanda was the first), Burkina Faso has not yet banned the production of plastic bags and so, as there is no garbage collec- tion or recycling system, the bags are practically everywhere, in the streets, in the rivers, tangled in every bush. Against this background of arid, sun-baked earth and piles of abandoned plastic, the garden is a small oasis of beauty, a sign of hope. Working with the teachers, the children grow ev- erything they can keep alive – okra, roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa), onions, beans, zucchini, carrots and lettuce – carefully protecting the seedlings from the sun using pieces of cloth and straw. As the soil is too hard and rocky to use directly, they’ve built rectangu- lar beds and filled them with earth and manure. Everyone helps with the garden work, watering the plants at 7 am and 5 pm, removing weeds and harvesting the vegetables.“We would like to plant some trees too, to make our garden more lively and give the plants shade and oxygen,” explains Abdoulay, age 8. “We’d like to have oranges and mangoes, but they don’t grow here.” There is only one fruit tree that can survive in this arid environment: the jujube or pommier du Sahel, which will be planted in the coming months.among the womenIn Ouagadougou, 50 women are cur- rently involved in a food garden, con- nected via the La Saisonniere associa- tion. The association was set up to help women learn to read and write, however many other activities have now sprung up around the classroom, including a half-hectare food garden. The garden was set up by retired teacher Sophie Salamata Selgho, together with agron- omist Moussa Ouedraougo. Each woman cultivates her own plot, rotat- ing crops and fertilizing the soil with compost. Plants include okra, black- eyed peas, sweet potatoes and trees such as moringa, papaya and néré (Parkia biglobosa, whose seeds are used to make a traditional seasoning). The produce is eaten at home, sold in a shop and at nearby markets, or used in a small restaurant set up next to the garden. The restaurant comprises of two or three simple tables, where the women serve stuffed tomatoes, sweet potatoes, mutton sausages and other cooked vegetables.19