15-04-2008: Sweet village life in Balsheigh?

(The following is just taken from my field report, not written to entertain ;-))

Through the example of house building, the chair man explains how communal labour has its place in the village. “When a man wants to build a house, he himself is responsible for providing the material, like sand, cow dung, wild fiber plants for the roofing or sink. But for the work he can count on all the village members to help him on the day he has announced. When strangers pass by they will lend a hand – even just for a minute – so that they know that anytime they have to hide for the rain they have a roof in this village.”

Some huge trees in the village provide not only shade, but also the local ‘cotton’: Kapok. Kapok is used to make pillows or matrasses. “Nowadays, the trader comes by to buy the produce and we just sell it for any price he gives. We don’t know the prices in other places, we just want to sell it. Yes the price is low. The revenue accrues to the family of the planter of the tree.”
Later on, we see old man making rope from a fibrous plant that grows in the wild and is also sometimes cultivated. The produce from this typical dry season activity, he himself goes to sell in the market. It is used to tie up cattle or building purposes.

The groundnut and rice processing and trading is women’s domain. Men help in the ground nut processing (during our group interview we sit under a tree for shade peeling groundnut while conversing) but the women from Balsheigh and some neighbouring communities organize themselves to go to the Tamale market to sell the produce to the retailers. The women also process the rice by threshing, cooking, drying. For this they use their own produce, but also buy extra rice. For this buying of unprocessed rice they can get a loan. Interestingly, the loan is often used to buy the rice produce from their husbands, so that the men can repay their farming loans.
For lunch and evening meal T-Z is served: a staple based on maize (thick maize porridge) with a sauce made from cassava leaves or groundnuts. Apologies were made that the maize was mixed with smashed cassava, as they started running out of maize. Cassava seems to be seen as a poor man’s crop instead of a ‘miracle crop’, that can still produce on very poor soils with little water and can be stored in the ground for a long time.
The chief receives our presents. Joris gives him hazelnut and walnut from his garden in the Netherlands as the counterpart for the bitter kola nuts we have received so often in the last days. “Oh your land must be sweet, since even the nuts taste sweet. Bring me the seeds to grow these trees.” The chief, old and fragile, kept on expressing his gratitude for our visit and said that we did very well. That it is hard to live in the village, that it is “not sweet”, that it was not like the life in the towns that attracted him so much. We explained him about the disadvantages of city life: the danger for the children to play, the haste of the people, the lack of social cohesion etc. He was surprised to hear that it is possible not to know your neighbors, to hear that life in the city is not only sweet. He was happy to see that we ate T-Z as he had been worrying about what to give us. And he was even more surprised that for us sleeping under the moon and stars on the floor of his compound was special to us…. We affirmed him that we were fine and happy and it was true. For the moment. When next morning’s porridge (a thinner version of last night’s dinner with some spices through it) was served, I knew I couldn’t live in the village conditions for more than some days if it were without my supplies of biscuits… That as a holiday the village life is sweet, but that it is the choice that makes it sweet. The knowledge that I can get a proper meal when I get back to town, that when I catch malaria I can leave and pay the treatment…