Headline Sep2,2012/ "As Go The Students-So Goes The World!"

"AS GO THE STUDENTS -
SO GOES THE WORLD!"

I have the honour to thank the President of India and I have the honour to thank the Prime Minister of India for the "Rite of Passage". This great and timely gesture befits the growing confidence of this Great Nation! God bless you all! The Indian Students and the world can now access : www.samdailytimes.blogspot.in  What is important now is that Indian Students step forward and make a great contribution. Remember, the World will beat a path to your Work and submissions, if you succeed in building SDT and !WOW! to the World's highest standards and once manage those lofty heights and ideals!

Onwards to Mali, where at the time, people were petrified on hearing about the hunger crises in Niger. It had a massive locust crises year before, which ate up the crops. Timbuktu is in the northern Mali, on the banks of Niger river. But the villages on the south side of Timbuktu are the worst of the worst. I asked the village chief, what are you living on now? What are you going to do? It was obviously a very painful conversation. For him to be answering in front of everybody was not the easiest thing in the world, yet we needed to have the conversation.

One option apparently was that they were going to borrow some seed, because they had lost everything - food, seed - to the locusts.And I asked what the terms would be. He had been looking down at the sand, and he raised his head and looked at me. The terms would be that they would have to pay it back twice, a 100 percent interest rate in one growing season, due in 4 months. Literally an impossible situation. But I had an idea that we were testing.

A couple of months before I was in Mali, I had been to the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh, which is along the Ganges River. The Ganges plain is home to hundreds of millions of people because you have intensive agriculture there. You go from farmhouse to farmhouse and everyone has a hand-pump and many treadle pump which you use to pump water by foot. And the reason is that the water table is very close to the surface. You just dig down to ten or fifteen feet and you hit water. In Mali, you had the Niger River, but no pumps. And it looked so familiar to me I said, How far down is the water table? Three meters, they said. Why don't you have a well down there? I asked, because everyone is without water. And they said, maybe we could do that. Maybe a large project could come in. I said, But you just need a Treadle pump here. This is perfect for small scale irrigation. Now a real expert will judge this. And we have great hydrologists and agronomists on our team. So we are going to start a village in Timbuktu, and we are going to prove that along the Niger you can have irrigation. The south of Mali is a cotton growing area where we also decided to build a village. And it is here that you can see the direct manifestation of how American Cotton subsidies actually lead to the "Death of Impoverished communities!"

Good night and God bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless