Peanut (and pecan) sheller Bill and I helped Roey, one of the fellows working on the Malian Peanut Sheller project, pour concrete for a sheller at the biofuels coop about a week ago.

By 'helped', I hope it is understood that we stood around asking an endless series of questions while we watched Roey do most of the work :) It was great, though; I love concrete, I love agriculture, I love the idea of increasing capacity with simple tools, and I assume I will love Africa when I get there sometime. Oh, and I love hanging out with Bill doing interesting things like learning how to make peanut shellers :)

The pictures might be confusing because there are actually two molds, one for each part of the sheller. But you'll get some idea of how it went anyway.

In the first picture, Bill and Roey are 'greasing' (actually 'buttering' because that was the only solid grease we had easily at hand) the mold for the sheller.



Then, Roey put the pieces of the mold together



And we took turns mixing concrete



Then the 'crete was poured into the mold

  ¶ 2:09 PM