Harvest Time

Florence, my language teacher, is a single mom, so when the time came for harvesting her ground nuts (peanuts), she asked my family if we would help. As a side note, her brother who was leaving as we arrived, told her later, she was quite the important thing in town since she had Americans harvesting for her.

It happened to be the Saturday that Melissa and Mercy were in town, so we all went, joined by Sandra, the journeyman on our team.

When we arrived, Florence told Sandra and I that we needed head wraps to keep the soil out of our hair, so she tied us up.

Unfortunately, mine slid off after 20 minutes or so.

Florence told my kids which leaves to look for. The reason we needed to distinguish is because cassava and corn are both planted in the field with the ground nuts (in no particular order).

Caleb had a lot of fun. It wasn't like work to him. He took off and every few minutes would come back and yell, "Mom, take a picture of this." And of course, I had to stop, get my camera, which was hanging on a barb-wired fence, and take a picture each time.

Another neighborhood boy helped, too, and I couldn't resist this picture.

The camera went up for a while, and then, when the field was finished, some more pictures were taken of us as we brought the piles to her yard to be dried.

I was carrying the plants in my arms, but Florence insisted we all do it on our heads. Kylie was the first to yell, "ME."

Then it was my turn, and of course, I don't know how to do it without using my hands, like the African women do. I also never thought I'd be doing "field" work in a skirt. When in Rome...

And Doug even tried it, even though it's a "woman" thing.

Of course, Frieda showed us all up with the load she carried

Sandra really wanted to learn how they do it without using their hands.

Doug gave up and just muscled it with his guns.

You can see that by the end, Florence was the only one still wearing her head wrap.

I'm a lot dirtier than I look.

This is a pile of just part of pasture #1. She has two more pastures to be harvested in a couple of weeks.

Since we still had some energy, we removed some of the peanuts from the plant

So they could be dried in the sun

It was a good day for all of us. I'm so glad we could be a blessing to Florence.

Of course, she sent us home with homemade chapattis and two bags of ground nuts for our work. She said it is a custom to send your workers home with part of the harvest. There's that "giving" thing again.

Which one of us was blessed to be a blessing?

I'd say we both were.