One morning in late July, I went with my friend Mamanaa to help weed her rice field. Rainy season was in full swing, the dampened soil wooing farmers au champ each morning. The lazy days of hot season had given way to long hours slaving away in the fields, trying to lure a year’s worth of food out of ruthlessly arid dirt.
I don’t have the strongest track record of “helping” with farm labor; my uncalloused American hands blister upon contact with a hoe. I must admit that I arrived in Togo with a romantic draw to subsistence agriculture – growing all your own food is so cool – but the honeymoon was swiftly over when the sweaty, achy, exhausting reality of savanna farming kicked in. High hopes (both my village neighbors’ and mine) faded to tepid persistence and the vaguely depressing realization that I was wholly incapable of improving anyone’s harvests. Despite all this, I figured weeding couldn’t possibly give me any trouble. Mamanaa started pulling up the tangle of green that had sprouted up around the rice, and I jumped right in to help. Grab, pull, toss, grab, pull, toss: this wasn’t hard at all!
All of a sudden an urgent cry broke my groove: “No, no, Pakyendu! Those are my beans!” Uh oh. Mamanaa darted over and held up one of the “weeds” I’d tossed. In my single-minded devotion to yanking up everything that wasn’t rice, I hadn’t noticed that she had intercropped a smattering of green beans, used in a local millet dish called flii. Oops.
“Kafala, kafala…” I apologized insistently. Mamanaa just laughed with exasperation. And so we kept on weeding, sweating out our unmet expectations in the midmorning sun.
