I thought what might be an interesting addition to my running country commentary would be posts on the general climate of village life in addition to my recounting of the many and varied of adventures that is my life. I hope that these occasional add ins might give a better flavor for what life feels like rather than just what happens.
Growing up in a State like Washington you can kind of forget that a simple reality of life can mean different things in different places depending on its distribution and quantity. Realty, rain, lots of it. In Washington it rains about 13 months out of the year and the other 3 months it rains. You can enjoy the calming nature of constant drizzle, curse the constant sogginess of all things, deal with emotional lows onset by 6 months of no sky, or happily anticipate that one day in the summer when you can head on down to the beach and parade that pasty white collection of skin that is your winter body, briefly surfacing after months of hibernation beneath your ample collection of flannel. "Oh hello ladies, just keeping it real." But out here it's life, its massive, unpredictable, uncaring, and all powerful. In a tiny little subsistence farming village all things circulate around rain. When its raining you talk about rain and you work for your years food and then it stops and you sit around and talk about rain whilst doing nothing. Talking with the farmers you start to tap in to their vast store of self taught empirical knowledge about the rain. From the number of layers on an onion to how hot it "feels" over a period of days they can tell you how much rain there's going to be, if the season will be good, and where the rain will come from. The month of June passed us by with almost no rain at all. Having decided to plant and cultivate my own field this year I often find myself at the bar with the other farmers asking questions of when I should be starting the different planting phases.
"After the third big rain, we start to prepare the fields".
Well apparently we normally get our third rain before the start of June and my village thins to a paltry 100 or so people as everyone rushes out to the fields to pick up the next phase in their cyclical existence. Well it's near the end of June and we have only had two, everyone simply sits and waits, there is nothing else to do, no other work to be had, everything is building up to this moment. The trees have responded to the climate change and have started to give fruit again, grass is begininning to sprout back out after months of dormancy, children wander around looking for their families free ranging donkeys to get ready to plow. The typical village day consists of climbing trees to throw down handfuls of tiny grapes and talking of small things. Despite the utter necessity of the rain to my village, nobody overtly shows stress or worry, oh they say things that might indicate worry, but there is no sign of it. It takes too much energy to worry over that which you cannot control and in their minds that includes most every aspect of their life. I sit in the bar and pepper them with questions.
"Will it be a bad rainy season? What happens if we miss the planting window? Will harvest be later?"
to which I'm met with the response
"Ryan, you think to much of things far away. It is better to think of things close to you, then you can make them the best you can. Do not be in a hurry to farm, the farming will come whether you are in a hurry or not"
So we wait. Which is all we can really do, there is no ecological advantage to pushing against life, pushing outside the box, because all you're pushing on is nature and while history has shown that Humans are great at pushing against to nature to negative ends, when it comes to willing more rain, we are utterly helpless. You take what life brings to you and simply do the best you can with it. The culture doesn't reinforce innovation, it reinforces waiting and being safe because those who take risks when dealing with rain tend to lose. What also stems from this is the beautifully supportive extended family structures which serve as an insurance policy against uncontrollable setbacks, but it also leaves you with a population head shy of innovation which makes the early stages of any agriculture project such a critical time because you have to make sure have enough early success to push them past the critical mass of implantation if you want to make it past that cultural safety net of security before innovation, but I digest. (word jokes).
Back to painting my village picture.
The rains come. It was an exciting day, I awoke one morning to see these dark clouds blotting out the southwest horizon and I knew they rains were coming. The whole village was buzzing, last minute preparations, herding of animals, tying down of materials, rushing to get indoors before that wall comes, and come it does. Two straight hours of unrelenting oratory and then calm, no sound. Then the farmers emerge, the tools of the trade tossed over their shoulders, all thoughts of the lateness of the rain washed away and they begin making their way back out to the farms to scratch out another year, that was just like the last year, and will be just like the years to come in this calmingly consistent world of theirs.
PS there are photos to go with this post, but the camera that has those photos is off on the other side of the country right now so you shall get them later, I super promise.
PPS......go Hawks.
