Isn't There an App for That?

     A while back I wrote about the first time I visited my permanent village of Sare Ngai.  I was given the chance to meet the people who would make up my Gambian family and was able to sneak a peak at the surrounding area.  During that visit, I also had the opportunity to see my host-father's peanut farm and "assist" in the fertilizing of the small buds.  (Read: I threw handfuls of pellets at the ground asking "is this too much?...is this enough?"  secretly hoping I wasn't killing the crops and setting the family up for starvation.)  This was in August.  Now Fall has arrived, bringing harvest season with it, and I have found myself having a go at farming once again.
     These past couple of months have been pretty full, so I'd only seen the growing plants a few times between that day in August and that day in late November, when I, alongside my three brothers, first mother, and a mysterious elderly woman made way back to the peanut fields.  So much had changed. We worked for many hours to collect, pile, separate and bag all of the groundnuts from this years' harvest.  There were so many steps involved, so much information to process.  Firstly, the day was chosen, I was told, because the wind conditions were just right, as it must be blustery for the process to work.  I didn't understand why, but then I saw.
     The unnamed woman stood tall in the crook of a small tree, its limbs fixed together into a sling-shot shape by my brother.  Hawa and I gathered up piles of nuts that had already been thrashed by the men in order to separate them from their stems and leaves.  Then, one at a time, we lined up to hand the old woman large metal bowls piled high with groundnuts, dirt, sticks and prickly plant bits. I watched as she waited carefully.  She stood thoughtfully, her bare, wrinkled feet clenched firmly around the branches, then, when the wind finally blew, she raised the bowl up high above her head and let the forces of nature carry the pieces of earth and debris back behind her, as the groundnuts-still in their shells-fell down heavy in a pile at my feet.

A billboard in the capital area showing local women harvesting their groundnuts.

     It was absolutely beautiful.  To watch them fall, to hear the loud cracking of the shells against one another, and to smell the freshness of the soil being blown away was all so spectacularly organic.  In our world where machines do all of the separating, scooping, sorting, it doesn't matter if the day is windy, rainy or still and baking hot.  But here, the people are so deeply in touch with nature simply because they must be-their livelihoods depend on it.  They have figured out ways to use the breeze, the rain, the sun, to work for them, with them, and it's incredible to realize how little else is actually needed to survive.  That said, at the end of the day, I looked down at my hands-they were filthy, scratched and bleeding.  Exhausted, I sat down with my brother and jokingly suggested that next year, we should really try and find a machine to help lighten the load.  He laughed and replied that yes, I can find the machine, but only in my dreams...When I wake up, maybe instead I can find some gloves.