Alisha Williams

It goes slow here but there is never enough of it. Days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months and I feel like I have lived in West Africa for years. It is not the truth but the time is deceitful. At five in the morning you have the perception that you have all the time in the world to write letters, to finish the household chores, to socialize with your new friends and neighbors and in one gulp of nescafé the sun is setting and you have fifteen minutes to do anything else that requires light. Harmattan is also the season of the recolte, the harvest. I have calluses forming over my newly healed blisters and the villagers are telling me of another champ that is scheduled to be harvested the next day. “Will you assist?” Yes. I will. It is all I have to feel that I am being productive and useful here as of yet. My first harvesting experience was far different from the others that followed and is indicative of the nuances of social standing in village.

The first sorghum harvest I helped out with was for the nurse’s wife (I do not know her name and everyone refers to her as le matron d’infirmiere). I overslept and as I was devouring raw tofu, too sleepy from battling the noises of bats and mice in my ceilings and drowsy from taking benadryl to get any rest to motivate myself to cook breakfast, I heard Victor’s voice outside. The day before at the petite marché one of the village men said something to me about helping with harvest near my house. It was my second week here at post and I didn’t fully understand him, he was slurring a bit and my French is far from perfect, I nodded and affirmed something I was not too sure of – a daily occurrence. It was eight o’clock and I had been awake maybe fifteen minutes when V. told me to get ready for harvest. A buzz of people filtered in and out of the compound and after grabbing a kitchen knife, which has now accompanied me to the fields many times, and deciding to change into pants instead of the pagne I had initially wrapped around myself thinking I might be in for a bit more work than I anticipated.

Indeed. We swept through the fields in lines of three to four cutting the tops of the sorghum stocks, swiftly taking time only to deposit handfuls of them into basins the apprentices followed us around with, pointing out when we had missed a stalk or two. Sweat, I have come to embrace it seeing as how there is no escape; after a bit I fell into rhythm with the others and realized I was the only woman helping. We took a couple breaks to drink tchouck (local fermented millet beer) and sit in the shade. The air was jovial, festive, and one of the farmers taught me a neat trick of how to weave a stock into a little triangular box. It felt as though a harvest was a harvest no matter where it happened. The harmattan winds made the work bearable and I concentrated on the manual labor that let my mind rest, listening to the white noise of the local language chatter amongst everyone surrounding me. By the time we all congregated around the mango tree in my compound to drink more tchouck and the men taking shots of sodabe (distilled grain alcohol from ?- essentially moonshine) it was nearly two o’clock. As I sat on my porch and chatted with new friends about various subjects with a calabash of tchouck in one hand and a bowl of fufu in the other I felt warm, and it was not a result of the alcohol or sun. I felt as though this whole two years thing might work out, that my life here in Ataloté could be real and fulfilling beyond work. I realized where the women had been… preparing food and drink for the men.

Then there was my harvest with Pelagie, the widow of Betsy, my predecessor’s, homologue (Togolese counterpart). I had helped her harvest with V. and a few others a few days before but I saw her after church and asked her how it was going. It was far from finished and I told her I would be at her house the next day to help out. I got there early and hung around the compound awkwardly while she made sure her kids were set. Pelagie and Betsy were very close for obvious reasons, she is distant and skeptical of me and this makes all of our interactions tense. I feel nervous and don’t know what to do with myself, not really sure what she is doing or if I am early and imposing on her morning I ask, “Are the others at the field already?” “Should I go on ahead?”

She looks up from the basin she is packing with her knife and a large container filled with tchouck, a standard to any trip to the fields, she lets out a sort of suppressed laugh “Who? Who else is there?” she looks down again and lifts the basin up onto her head, “It is just you and me.” I realize the importance of this moment in our relationship. I feel a bit hollowed. It felt like everyone had showed up to help the nurse’s wife, all the gardeners/farmers from the groupement, all the familiar faces I know around town. The day before at Pelagie’s champ there had been far less, but there had still been help. I realized that for the past few days she had been harvesting by herself. The nurse’s wife is a functionaire, her husband has left to a big city further south to continue his studies but he will send for her and her three children soon. They have money. Her temporary dwellings in our compound will not last for long and soon she will move back into the life she is accustomed to. Pelagie has been abruptly widowed with three children to raise, a field to maintain, and a garden to scrap together enough to get by. Her husband was the president of the gardening groupement and well respected in the community. She is strong, perhaps one of the strongest women I have ever met. I would have thought that the community would pitch in more than they did, but what would they benefit? With the nurse’s wife there was a gain to be had, with Pelagie there was duty but it only reached so far. That morning when I woke up I thought about not going, showing up later and excusing it as being sick or something. It was one of those moments that I knew I had made the choice that would go great lengths to helping me integrate, to help me belong.

The harvest went about the same. By that time I had gotten my technique down. I could keep up; it was nice to work in silence side by side. Here I have found there is no micro-managing, people just know how to work together, it happens seamlessly, or at least that is my understanding. A gesture here, a nod, there are not slackers here. You work, or you don’t. We worked like that all morning and it was beautiful, a silent bond between us was bridging. As I sat for a moment in the shade watching Pelagie prepare the stalks by tramping them down to the ground, I could see her as a small girl. She couldn’t be too much older than me. Her face is round and her hair is shorn. She has large eyes that droop slightly, you can see what the sadness has done, you can feel it when you look at her and it makes one slightly uncomfortable for being more content. But in the field I could see her as her daughter, her deft movements of work she had done for longer than she could remember. Life had worn her down but she was quiet about it, always speaking in a soft mumble.

There were moments, if you could spend enough time with her,that you could peek behind the veil of grief and see what she might have been like before. Funny, witty, strong. At one point during the day, when we were nearing a tree that stood in the middle of the field, she stopped short. We both looked under the tree and heard a faint rustling, she took a quick step back and quickly searched for and found a large rock nearby and threw it under the tree, “Il y a un serpent!” and again I could see the girl. We laughed at our femininity, shaking off our shared moment of weakness and got on with the work.