It Reminded Me of the Times of Boaz and Ruth

Today started with a morning date-walk for Monsieur and Madame Tom!  What fun we had checking out the rice harvest in the fields 1/2 mile from our house.  We left the house around 8, thinking the skies were rather overcast.  It wasn't until later when the mist didn't disappear that we realized it was, in fact, dust.  Sorry for the haziness in the pictures.  

The fields were ripe for harvest. 

Unlike ripe wheat, the head of the rice doesn't stick up above the leaves.

The harvesters were hard at work:  bending over at the waist, grabbing a clump at a time, slicing it off a couple of inches from the ground and throwing it onto a pile for another worker to pick up and carry to the threshing area.

We walked out into the fields to check it out close-up.  These workers are paid 20,000 cfa ($42) to cut and thresh the .32 hectare (.8 acres).

Farmer Tom had to try his hand at it.  I told him he bent his knees waaaayyyy too much! Plus he was wearing shoes.

The harvested stalks are piled up and carried this way to the "threshing floor."

The barrels are stuffed with the rice stalks to make it as heavy as possible and then turned on its side to be used as a "thresher."

A bundle of grain was grabbed and hit across the barrel and the rice all fell out onto the tarp below.

The harvest this year was good, in spite of the fact that there was only one harvest instead of two this past year.  This was due to flood which brought it new soil and nutrients. The .8 acre plot yielded 25 100-kg bags (one kg is 2.2 lbs.) which at 45 lbs/bushel, comes to 122 bushels for less than an acre!

Out in the fields,  women  were allowed to follow the harvesters and pick up any stalks they left.

They threshed with sticks, beating the pile of stalks.  What they found and threshed, was theirs to keep.  It reminded me so much of the story Ruth in the Bible.

The grain was transported, sacked and weighed at a nearby cooperative.

The hay was bound up for livestock feed.

As we were walking by I snapped a picture of this pile of hay and it wasn't until the haystack started moving that I realized there was a camel underneath the haystack.

The last stop was at the bagging, weighing station.  The chalkboard was the way of keeping track of all the details.

Here are a few of the details Tom put together in case there is a farmer out there reading this post:

Rental fee from the cooperative:  $104 for the .8 acre plot
Fertilizer:  1) Urea  2)15-15-15
Average yield/acre:  152 bushels/acre (irrigated, of course, with water from the Niger River)
Price per 100 kg bag:  14,000 cfa or $29

P.S. A Job Well Done

Yep, it's all done.  All we wait for now is a nice hard rain to wash off the sidewalks and to wash the bit that's left in the drainage canal down to the river.  It smells better, looks so much better.

Here's what the final clean-up looked like:

Gutter Cleaning. (Hold Your Nose for this Post)

I've mentioned the street in front of our house.
It was new 1 1/2 years ago.
There is a lovely, wide sidewalk, wide enough for cars to drive on... which they do from time to time.  Next to that, between the lovely sidewalk and our house is a large gutter for water to course down when the rains come.  It is about 3 feet deep and 2 1/2 feet across, uncovered except for the entrance to our driveway.

 We don't have much rain here so 9-10 months of the year this trench gets filled up with sand, plastic bags and garbage of all kinds - a very handy garbage dump.  Worse than this, it has repeatedly served as the dumping ground for the emptying of a liquid sewage trunk that empties out cesspools. Absolutely gross, I know.  It reeks, too.

 So since the time we moved into our house, 3 years ago, we have watched it fill up.  Last week, it was within inches of the top.  Really nasty.

Last week, we had a pleasant surprise, as city workers, starting at the other end of the road, began to painstakingly dig out the sand and everything else that had accumulated in this trench.   Would they come all the way to our house, a mile away?

Yesterday was the day.

The "goop" was all piled onto the sidewalk to dry out and is to be hauled off in the next week...we hope. 

The job was accomplished in a matter of hours and they moved on down the road. 

 There were even treasures found--spoons that had somehow gotten tossed with the garbage. My neighbors tried to re-claim those but the diggers insisted that "finders, keepers; losers, weepers".   And the number of old tires was amazing.

  I know this hasn't been a very pleasant blog post--just the stark reality of living on Mulberry Street.

p.s.  Wish the blog had "smell" capacity so you could get the real flavor of life on M. Street.

School on Mulberry Street

There are so. many. kids.
   On Mulberry Street.
         In our neighborhood.
                  Everywhere we walk there are kids.
                   
                 So. many. kids.

I can't begin to know all the names of the kids that live in the two houses/yards on either side of our home.  Scads of them.  Some we've gotten to know quite well.  Some of the little ones will run to meet us if they see us walking down the sidewalk towards home.  A couple of them love to sneak inside the house in the hopes of getting a cookie or a cracker.

We enjoy them.

This afternoon I went outside to check on "life on Mulberry Street" and  saw a beautiful sight.

 Someone had thrown away slightly termite eaten paper and documents from an office and these kids had found the treasures and were playing school!  The "professor" sat on the large rock under the tree.  (It looks like he has white hair, but due to the intense heat, he has a severe case of heat rash so the powder helps to make him feel better, but it also served to make him look like a REAL professor!)

None had pencils or other writing instruments.   The "professor" had a tiny piece of charcoal he was trying to write with so I grabbed a box of crayons to add to the fun and pulled up a chair to observe the play school, Niger-style.

Having a writing tool,  "the prof" began to carefully write down the names of all his pupils and then called the roll.

Recitation came next.  Each one got up to count as far as he could, in French, of course, which is the language they speak and learn in at school, but not at home.

I was reminded of all the times as a kid that I had set up my pretend school in the kitchen on Sunday afternoons and coerced my little brother to be my pupil. And Lindsay! A natural from the beginning. She spent hours teaching Erika "everything she needed to know about everything!"

This evening I went out on the porch to hang up a wet rug and found another school set up in our yard.  This time  "the professor" was the student, learning his multiplication tables, reciting them over and over and over again. His teacher was the neighbor boy who is in jr high.