In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, right now we’re in the thick of the harvest, even starting to wind down a bit. At this point pretty much all of the harvest is either out of the ground or off the stalk, excepting only the six month millet, which still has a bit to go. But let’s be honest, a harvest is hard work, and I’ve been getting a taste of it.
The other day I went out and pulled up peanuts for about an hour. I left exhausted and my brother and his second wife just smiled in appreciation of my effort, even though they themselves weren’t yet ready to call it quits, and had been out there for hours before I even showed up. I think they were just happy and proud that I came out to see their harvest, which I was impressed by.
It’s fun to get the first hand experience of seeing the cultivation and harvest. I think it’s important to gain an appreciation for where our food comes from. Before Africa I couldn’t have even have told you how a peanut grows because it usually just came straight from a tin can. In case you didn’t know, each peanut that we eat hides in a shell that comes out of the ground on ends of the roots of the plant. When you yank up a peanut plant you’ll find about a dozen root ends that have peanuts attached to them. Amazing, we eat peanuts all the time and yet how many of us know how it grows and the process involved in growing them! And just like the luck involved with the germination of peanuts and all the other crops (which I briefly mentioned months back) it takes a little luck to come up with a good harvest. The maturity and harvest of peanuts needs to be timed up with relatively dry conditions so the peanuts don’t rot or sprout in the ground before you get them up.
But despite the fatigue of the peanut harvest, I’ve found myself better suited to lend a hand with the rice harvest. As it turns out, beating rice is a decent substitute to batting practice! And lately, my family compound has been filled with rice needing a good beating! Yes, there’s been maize, beans, sorghum, peanuts and millet coming through, but it seems like I’ve seen more rice than anything! Maybe it’s just because it takes so much work!
Rice here appears to be one of the crops that is mainly tended to by women for whatever reason. While men occupy themselves with other cultures, the women seem to dominate the rice fields (one day I tried to weed rice for about 10 minutes and not only was I very inefficient, everyone laughed in part I think because of how out of place I looked as a man). And so my mom and all my sisters have their own harvests of rice to take care of. They come back from the fields navigating donkey wagons full of bails of rice; long stems of rice which tassel at the tips where the individual grains of rice are, all bundled together with cord. To start, the rice grains are protected by a hard shell that they break off with a pestle and mortar and then winnow off after. But before you can do that, you have to take all the rice grains (still encased in their shells) off of the long stems. And this is where batting practice and wood chopping experience comes in handy, because you have to beat the rice stems with a palm branch until all the grains fall off (just like my brother’s first wife is doing in the picture). Considering some of my baseball withdrawals since being here, I kind of enjoy the occasion to beat some rice, especially if it’s in the cool air of the evening (however, they’ll be at it all day…I’ve been getting woken up at five to the sound of the thwacking, and they’ll pick away at it all day).
Finally, I get a chance to put a picture up of my mysterious dog! He had a field day playing in the leftover rice stems, where I caught him hanging out before dinner the other day. So for all of you curious about Boots, here ya go
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