Planting Season

We’re well into the rainy season here which means the mangos are gone, the mosquitoes are out, and everyone is hard at work in the fields. The new trainnees land in country the night of the 10th, and as I think about myself a year ago, its amazing how much I really feel at home here. These foreign, strange people have become my close friends, I speak their language well enough to have real meaningful conversations, and I even find myself wanting to be more like them. My millet pounding has greatly improved (I don’t knock over the hollowed out tree stump much any more subsequently spilling a family’s dinner on the mud…), and while everyone is farming, I wanted to jump on the bandwagon.
“Well, what would you plant? Millet? Corn?” Shaka asked me on one of our runs.
“Nah, when those things are ripe theres so much of them around. I want to plant something that there isn’t much of.”
“Like what?”
“Cucumbers.”
So my host family agreed to give me a section of their garden so I could plant my cucmbers. But, I didn’t really want to be crowding them. “Is there like a field or something I could throw down my cucumber seeds?” Ever since my mom saw Dafine’s garden on her trip here, she begged her to help me start a little gardening. One day, Dafine had Shaka take me out behind her garden to show me the place I could plant my cucumbers. Turns out, it was an entire abandoned garden! Somebody just left it there, and gave Dalfine the permission to let me have it! It’s so perfect. It’s got a good amount of space, a stick fence and gate around it so the animals don’t get in, two dug out wells, and it’s right near Shaka’s family’s garden. When the 4 boys took me to see it, I jumped up and down and picked them all up and spun them around. I couldn’t believe this was my garden!
Shaka and the younger boys agreed to help me out, and they’re also gonna grow some stuff in it themselves to sell at the market. Me and Shaka are going seed shopping on Saturday- not just cucumbers my friends, but green peppers, maybe carrots, and a few other vegetables that you wouldn’t know and I don’t know the English words for them anyways.
Before our run we went out there with little garden hoes. It’s tough work. There’s no rotar-tiller here, or hose. To water it, I’m gonna have to buy a watering can and tie it to a string and draw water from the deep well. I couldn’t believe how those boys can work it. It’s their life though. Once school gets out- it’s to the fields. I see my boys less and less these days because they’re always working. Their daily afternoon “Let’s go bug Aminata” sessions, which previously drove me crazy, have thinned out and I miss them. But to have them come and work with me in my garden was the funnest thing ever. They didn’t even beg me for candy either (but I gave them some anyways, I’m such a sucker.)