In Mauritania, a country on Africa’s northwest coast, 75 percent of the land is desert, thanks to persistent drought. In fact, the Sahara is steadily creeping westward, encroaching on the capital city of Nouakchott and uprooting many of the country’s citizens from their homes in the interior.

The notion of anything green sprouting from the earth there seems far-fetched; sand drifts can take over entire buildings. But for Bill and Joe Stoffregen and Tracy Sides, helping Mauritanians learn to accomplish such a feat was the experience of a lifetime.

Invited by the Mauritania government to landscape the Olympic stadium there and teach local workers how to grow and maintain plants, the three traveled in February to dig in the dirt of an environment that couldn’t be more different than that of their home state.

What they didn’t expect was for their work to transcend horticulture and landscape design, affecting the life of a community.

Joe Stoffregen is a 1985 graduate of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Department of Horticultural Science. He and his father, Bill Stoffregen, who studied forest management at N.C. State before becoming a Wake County forest ranger, own and operate Homewood Nursery in Raleigh. Tracy Sides, a 1993 horticultural science graduate, runs Landvision Designs, a landscape design company, with his wife, Crystal Sides, a 1992 graduate of the Horticultural Science Department.

Landvision Designs operates on-site at Homewood Nursery as a sister company. “We grow the plants and Landvision puts them in the ground,” Joe aptly describes their partnership.

“Our companies are so tangled, it’s not even funny,” he kids, adding, “Our unique skill sets made us a great pair to go to Mauritania.”

Why Africa? For years, Bill has traveled to Mauritania to help its citizens learn to grow trees, herbs and other plants that thrive in the arid climate and could add value to their communities. He travels in partnership with the Agricultural Development Initiative (ADI), a non-governmental organization created by retired College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty to help citizens of third-world countries develop sustainable agricultural practices.

Bill has helped Mauritanians grow neem trees, the fruit of which produces an extract used as an insecticide, as well as for human medicinal purposes. The tree grows well in Mauritania and could be a profitable cash crop. Bill’s strong ties to the Mauritanian community, the local government and ADI were the genesis for the Olympic stadium project.

“This trip to Africa was probably the most special of all my trips because I was doing something different,” Bill says. “Usually I struggle to keep people interested in a project. This time, I came back feeling like I’d really done something for them. The other thing that set it apart was the opportunity to work with my son Joe and to have Tracy along … he’s one of my boys, too. That was special.”

The three lived in a compound owned by ADI, surrounded by a six-foot wall with a guard at the door. A few weeks before their arrival in Mauritania, an attack on the Israeli embassy there had killed two.

“We went with some caution, but immediately felt welcomed and safe,” Joe says. Todd Helm, an American citizen who works with ADI, served as their host. He and his family live in Mauritania, “committed to helping the people there,” Joe says.

During their two-week stay, Tracy developed extensive designs for stadium land use, while Joe and Bill focused on teaching plant establishment and maintenance. They began their work focusing primarily on the facility’s sports component (designing soccer, rugby and baseball fields, for example) but realized quickly that the project was turning into a whole lot more.

Olympic athletes train in the 10,000-seat stadium, and local, national and even high-school soccer teams play there. “So we thought the focus of our work would be the athletes,” Tracy says. “But that’s actually a very small part of the stadium use. The biggest surprise to me was how the community uses the space. It’s a place where people exercise together and kids play.”

The biggest hurdle, he says, was to quickly learn the Mauritanian culture in order to design space that would be useful. Before leaving the U.S., Tracy used the Internet to map and measure the entire stadium. He spent days at the facility interviewing people, and he developed unique plans to meet their specific needs.

“At five o’clock every day, there is a call to prayer, so we designed a prayer area inside the stadium,” Tracy says. He also designed a private walking circuit where women could remove their burkas to exercise together. Because of cultural practice and a meat- and dairy-laden diet, nearly 25 percent of women in Mauritania struggle with obesity and diabetes.

“Other than this stadium, there is not a park area in the capital city for people to go for recreation,” Bill says. “The folks there wanted areas for women to walk, for some way to combat this problem of diabetes.”

An imaginative children’s play space that Tracy designed features dunes to crawl on and hide behind, with palm trees for shade. He also drew up gardens for people to sit and enjoy a bit of green space.

“We had an initial list that requested layout for sports fields and a park, but all of these other items were a total surprise,” Tracy says. He also provided solutions for crowd control, parking, litter and restroom placement.

While Tracy tackled design, Joe and Bill worked with two translators to teach the locals everything from proper pruning to propagation. “We learned that red sand grew better than white sand,” Joe says, “so we had a lesson on that.

The people lack specific agricultural knowledge and skill sets, because of lack of information, Joe says. “The country has a department of agriculture, but there is no outreach like our Cooperative Extension Service. The infrastructure to get information to the people doesn’t exist.”

Joe visited several nurseries in the area to get ideas of what to grow. He also met with a university professor there who is building a database of indigenous plants.

“The overriding theme that kept coming up in our meetings is that the stadium is the most recognized point in the city, if not the country,” Joe says.

“They kept referring to the stadium as ‘our oasis,’” Tracy says. At the same time, he says, it became increasingly apparent that their work on the stadium project would help tackle social issues by providing a place for community exercise, recreation and socialization.

“We went there to produce a good, to leave a good, and that’s what we’ve done,” he adds. “But that’s a tenth of what I took back. Although we’re very different, the Mauritanian people are just like us. It seems so simple, but to me, it is very interesting.”

Will they return to Mauritania? “100 percent yes,” Tracy says. Bill and Joe agree. Major progress already is being made on their concept designs.

“Having your own business is not just about making money,” Joe says. “In this case, there was a need, and we offered a skill set. We just went; we didn’t think twice.

“This was a big project, and it was different than anything any of us had ever done,” he continues. “It was neat to put our knowledge and skills to good purpose, to help someone else, to improve somebody’s life.”

— Suzanne Stanard