Today I’ll tell you guys a bit about a recent little project I’ve been doing in village. Being as the last couple of months have been the harvest, people’s lives have been swamped with the endless associated chores, such as the ones I explained in the last blog. Among these chores is the very tedious process of deseeding ears of maize. Unlike us back home who eat our corn fresh off the cob or canned, most of the maize people here produce is dried and stored. If you’re in a hurry, you take your ears (shucked) and leave them in the sun for a couple days until their dry. Then you chuck ‘em all in your storage room or grainery if you have one. However, at some point all those dry kernels need to get stripped off the cob before they can either be sold by the bowl full, or ground down to make the flour that makes their staple meal, “la pate”.
And this my friends, is another massively tedious process. There are two approaches. First option any guess? Yes, once again, like the rice, beat the cobs with a stick and in a long, sweaty flurry of flying kernels (we did it just the other day at our house). The second option is a little less aggressive and often quite social. People will spend hours sitting around a basin breaking the individual kernels off the cob with their thumbs (yes x-box gamers, you too just may have an adaptable skill for agriculture!). It’s even a bit of a social chore, since people are rarely left to do it on their own. If you stop by a family compound where someone’s working on this job, the common courtesy is to join in on the work and whatever conversation ensues. But as a rookie to the task I still wouldn’t call it a picnic. I joined in not long ago for a solid hour and left with cramped and blistered thumbs. And I’m not the only one who would complain about this job, many would agree that it’s quite a pain. Mais sinon, on va faire comment?
One of the ideas that I have been given as an “extension agent” (my technical title as a volunteer) by my boss, is to propagate and share a metal tool that can strip corn cobs with much more efficiency. The tool, which resembles an oversized and hollow Reeses cup, open on both ends and lined with thin ribs on the inside, was something I could busy myself with trying to replicate in village. You use it by inserting the ear of corn and rotating the cob and the tool in opposite directions, allowing the ribs to grip the kernels and rip them off in a hurry. And it really wasn’t too hard replicate, being as my boss had already provided me with a model. It also gave me an excuse to meet and learn the trade of the man known as “le marmitier”, or (drum roll please….) the cauldron-maker.
As it turns out, the grand majority of pots and cauldrons that are found here, aren’t the ones turned out in factories in Lomé or abroad. Rather, most are made locally out of all manner of aluminum scrap, ranging from coke cans to other broken pots to the more often relied upon car parts. So despite the lack of recycle bins in Togo, aluminum adds itself to the long list of things that Togolese and Africans alike recycle to a substantial degree. In fact, although Coke cans don’t leave the store requiring a deposit, once empty they can be found in a collection of aluminum that fetches about a dollar per kilo.
With that mess of useless looking metal the marmitier makes his trade. It allows him and his handful of apprentices to go work. Even in village, this aluminum (even including exhausted engine blocks!) is melted down in a cast iron pot, (for whatever reason aluminum melts much quicker than iron). The pot sits on scorching charcoal which is kept unusually hot by an underground ventilation system, powered by a hand crank, which is manned by one of the apprentices. The aluminum heats and heats until a runny liquid is created. All the impurities of the scrap, including dirt or un-melted metal float on top and are easily sifted off the top, usually with long iron prongs and a sardine can (which too, won’t melt with the aluminum). Then the metal is ready to be poured.
While two apprentices are charged with the job of melting the aluminum (and sometimes all four if it involves melting an engine block…no small task but then again no more complicated than heat and a sledge hammer), the marmitier and an apprentice or two set to work making their molds. Were any of you reading ever big into making sand castles? If you were, I got your African job already figured out. Now it’s a little complicated to explain in words, but their molds are made of nothing more than tightly packed sand, since it can hold together when liquid aluminum is poured on it, yet once the aluminum sets it falls away without any pains. To make the sand molds, they have split cauldrons serving as positive models to help them. They start by crafting the inner negative mold, which will lie upside-down and fixed to the ground. Off to the side they craft the outer negative mold in a series of boxes to be placed around the first mold (being careful to create a conduit in the sand where the bottom of the cauldron will be for the metal to pass through). Then the outer mold is carefully assembled around the inner mold to finish the prep.
If you’re trying to imagine it, you’d now be looking at what appeared to be only a box packed with sand and a small hole on top. In reality, that hole is the entrance into the mold. If the molds are properly positioned, the conduit leads the liquid metal into the space in between the two negative molds of sand when poured. Now cross your fingers and hope the sand stuck and that the molds were well meshed. After no more than 5-10 seconds you can start to break away the sand, because the metal will have set, although it’ll be hot for minutes (the hardened kids still like to try and hot potatoe it, showing off by seeing whose hands can stand the heat the longest). They’re pretty good at what they do, but they’re still forced to redo many a pot for having gotten a bad set (FYI, in the picture they’re actually pouring a cauldron top and not a cauldron itself, sorry if it makes it more confusing!).
So to come back to the maize theme, by adapting the techniques he uses in his shop, my marmitier is slowly taking on the side trade as “maker of the thing that deseeds maize”. He’s already made a handful of sales with me at his side for 300 fCFA (~60 cents), like we’re doing in the picture on market day, and hopefully with time, he’ll get more and more requests to make this tool, which can deseed corn cobs about 5 times as fast as by hand. For now, he gets the pride of introducing a new tool to his community and I walk away with a free apprenticeship in cauldron making. Haha, and so goes my humble life as a Peace Corps volunteer!
Happy Thanksgiving!
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