Update on those Fields though

Yes I know I am posting an update on a blog post at the same time that I posted the post that is being updated, but I actually did write them at different times so if you want you can read my first farming post and then wait a few weeks before reading this one for dramatic effect?  Or simply binge upon all of my wonderful posts at once because you delight in my prose and find my dry humor powerfully addicting.  Whichever route you decide to take, always remember, the choice is yours.

Well since returning to my village in the final week of July from my solo trip through Togo and Benin farming has firmly occupied all of my waking moments.  In part its because I've never farmed by hand (let alone farmed at all) before and as such I am a lot slower than everyone else in village.  But it's also slightly due to the fact that I am a bachelor in a farming community.  To look at marriage from an economic utility standpoint it makes complete sense to get married young and procreate often in a community that relies upon subsistence farming.  To borrow from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress marriage is a "device for conserving capital and insuring the welfare of children", in this case it is also key to survival and rests at the core of a remarkably adept interdependent society.  In the West there is a culture of privilege were you grow up being informed by our cultural that the individual is king, your successes are yours and you got to where you are by your own hard work and nobody gave you any freebies on the way and in a way the relative wealth of the West works to mask the glaring inaccuracies of this ideal.  Realistically you can have success in the Western world with very little interaction with other people.  You can stay single, find a job, receive your paychecks avoid friends, and binge on Netflix every weekend all in the comfort of relative solitude if you so choose without running the risk of dying or starving to death.  Amidst all of this its easy to see why cultural attitudes exist that insist that we can do everything on our own.  Yet if you truly want to convince someone that they rely upon others in everything that they do in life, put a hoe in their hand and say "plant".
In village I am able to eek by alone because while living and farming in village I am still a salaried individual and can use that money to support myself.  For the rest of the village, you're nothing without community.

Most all of my waking moments in village over the past month have been devoted to farming giving me a better appreciation for the word "exhaustion" in all of its varied implications as well as my dependence upon community.  I got back to site to find my fields well sprouted yet surprisingly overgrown with weeds.  It was a little startling, I had left on my trip at the onset of rainy season so having left a dry desert dirt land I was rather shocked to see how quickly vegetation had picked back up from last year.  "No problem" I thought "I'll just weed that all this week and I'l be good to go".  No idea why I thought it would be this after my planting farce, but the mind is quite good at forgetting unpleasantness and that looks to be what had happened.  The next morning I grabbed my Daba (pictured below) and went at it without exactly knowing what to do, but hey, its just weeding, how hard could it be?  Turns out, stupid hard.  I enthusiastically started hacking away with my little hand hoe, hands nicely callused up at this point, and body positioned in the 90 degree farming bend as I meandered my way through the fields, hacking, yanking, throwing, and destroying all weed life before me.  My core problem was that I had a lot more tasks stacked up than just weeding my soy fields and my delightfully short attention span precludes any true single task devotion.  I needed to weed my soy fields, dig a new garden bed, plant said garden bed, transplant about 40 Acacia trees along my field, and start moving my Moringa trees from their growing bags into the fields that had been left aside for our Moringa project.  So like a squirrel getting ready for winter each of these tasks received about 5% of my attention and time in order of highest to lowest interest and while this kept me moving at a good pace the end result after 10 hours was an exhausted Ryan and five barely started tasks.  The problem was that this time around I wasn't working one exhausting day and then scurrying off on a vacation.  I was working one exhausting day and then waking up to do the exact same thing again.  And again.  And again.  My mind was like mush and when I went to bed each night little weeds danced before my eyes.  These weeds came to define my existence.  I gave each species a deservedly sharp nasty nickname, I came up with names for the Daba strokes that I used to kill the individual species, and spend enough time farming and you will slowly come to learn interesting facts about yourself that you would have never otherwise stumbled across.  We are all filled with facts, preferences, and skills.  For example if you are good at basketball you know that about yourself.  Some people have found that they love chocolate cake, but hate vanilla cake.  They know this because they live in a cake soaked world where they have probably been introduced to both kinds of cakes and have therefore had the chance to learn these facts about themselves.  Others prefer chunky peanut butter to smooth.  What I am saying is that your environment pushes certain facts out of you, facts that may have been there all along, you had just never been presented with the proper stimuli.  Well here I was learning all sorts of interesting tidbits about myself that I sometimes wish had remained dormant.  For instance, after having spent over 100 hours thrashing around in my muddy soy fields I can tell you that I somewhat prefer the taste of soil with a high clay content as opposed to a high sand content.  I know my weeding time per row like an Olympic sprinter knows his 200m dash.  On a post rainy day I can weed a heavily infested row of soy in 60 minutes, but if it has dried out I can bust that bad boy out in 45...43:12 is my record.  I know certain weeds only die if you shake all of the dirt out of their roots otherwise they come back as zombie weeds with the next rain, permitting you to re-weed vast swathes of your field whilst re-watering your plants with your tears.  I also know that soy planted in clayey soil will develop about 50% faster than soy in gravely soil.  As you can see, non of these are real resume diamonds and if I were to buy you a drink at a bar and then regale you with my preferences for clayey soil its rather unlikely that I would be getting your number on that particular evening.  But that being the case, these are some of the new facts about myself that I have gleaned from having my life utterly consumed by farming.  Every day I'm back in the fields by 8:00, 9:00 if I was feeling a bit chuffed that morning, I work until noon, I buy rice and sauce at the market, eat and repose until 14:00 at which point I'm back in the fields until 18:00 at which point I crawl back into my home, prepare the simplest dinner possible of which I have ingredients for and then go to bed.  Days 1 and 2 I was actually doing 10 hours rather than this abbreviated 7-8 hour schedule.  But by day 3 my body informed me that it was uncomfortable with this new arrangement by getting sick and so I slackened off a bit.  Despite this ridiculously fun workload I found that I wasn't really making much progress.  As I hinted about above I had to double weed huge portions of my fields because I didn't properly shake the weeds out and they all just came back, switching to my new weed shaking process dropped my productivity to a crawl (not literally this time) and I was starting to realize that I once again couldn't do this alone.  I was barely able to even feed myself alone, not to mention my house looked like a small bomb had gone off because I had no time to clean.  My clothes were all dirty so I wore my same farming pair each day and when we had a heavy rain I just hung them on the lines and called it clean.  I was getting a chance to see firsthand the importance of family and community in my little village.  And so I turned to them.  I hired my neighbor and her two friends to help me weed and the difference it made was unbelievable.  I could breath again.  My sweaty pathetic attempts over the course of 2 weeks had barely knocked out a quarter of my fields and then they came in a wiped everything out in a single morning. A single. Morning.  I wouldn't have believed it possible if I hadn't been there with them like some overgrown kid getting in the way.  They flew through line after line while I was left standing in the background holding my lower back in pain, covered in dirt and sweat, and carefully shaking each weed to death.  No breaks, no complaints, just business as usual.  I paid them in a slight daze, tried to thank them but they just laughed it off, and watched them zip back off to their own fields to work some more.  With my new breathing room I finally a little bit got my life back together, cleaned the house, tidied up the weeding they'd done, set up some real meals to cook.  Also left with a new found appreciation for what its like to live in Kogho.  Not as some sort of Tenant, but as a real resident of the village.  This is the only reality that you know, there are no others, at least nothing possible.  This is your world, the space you have been given to occupy and you make due with what is there. 

Having been saved by the community I still knew my troubles were far from over.  Putting down fertilizer was an absolutely miserable week and its almost time for the second round of weeding.  I also insisted to the three women that they don't weed the entirety of my field, I had them leave that space where I planted myself.  I had prepared it on my own,  planted it, and I wanted to see it through to the end.  That being said, it is still not all the way weeded and we're almost ready for the second round of weeding out here, a true testament to the eye watering speed of my hand hoe-ing.  But despite the rather constant exhaustion, the aches, the soreness, the ample gallons of sweat that I have poured into the ground, and the one dimensional-ness of my life right now, I am still glad that I was dumb enough to plant a half a hectare of soy by myself.  In addition to my preferences in soil taste, I have learned a lot about myself through the whole process and will probably continue to do so through the next weeding period and the eventual harvest, learning how to balance a busy life with the necessity of farming.  I have also earned a new lenses with which to view the people in my village, a lens that can only be bought and paid for with time and sweat.

Pictured above:  The local weeding Daba, great for taking down fields full of weeds and the integrity of your lower back.