trying to be a farmer

This year's rainy season, as I've mentioned before, has been monsoon-like. I've already complained about traveling difficulties and praised the pluses of using rain water, and now I'd like to mention an after-effect of a good rainy season: farming.

Going to the fields is a Garlyan's favorite thing to do. After some bread is munched, some coffee slurped, and the horse cart loaded with picks and supplies for tea-making, all able and willing bodies head into the quickly warming sun to get cracking at their barely-income generating backbreaking work.

Everyone's plot of land, just months ago covered by the river, is slowly but surely coming back into view, as the river recedes back to its original size. Every couple of days, what was mushy gushy mud is now moist and fertile soil. It's time to jab poles in even rows for corn and beans. It's time to dig foot-wide holes for sweet potatoes. Roots are hacked away and already sprouted bean leaves are plucked to make the most (and only?) delicious meal in Pulaar land: hako.

This work requires a person to bend over, up to their ankles in mud. Dirt nestles into fingernails and the sun rises and rises, getting unbelievably hot in the cloudless, merciless sky, baking the backs of our legs and necks.

I can last about three hours. Almost everyone else has their lunches brought to them, so they can work and work and work and work until they want to drop. And then they walk home, eat the fresh hako and find the energy to socialize so loudly and so late into the night that their tired toubab can't sleep. The cycle begins all over again, the next day, as the sun is plotting its next energy-zapping attack.