11/9 & 10 Digging

Peter (one of the younger students) and I started planting popcorn
and sorghum in the field next to the girls compound. To plant in the
dryland someone takes a hoe and digs a hole in the ground then takes a
step forward and repeats while walking in a straight line to the end
of the field. Another follows far behind with the seed, dropping it
in the tilled hole and then covering it with more soil. Generally
there’s a crew of people doing this with one of the older guys leading
everyone to make sure they are evenly spaced and straight. If you
were to see how rocky and bumpy the land is before this process you
would understand how confusing this is to a new comer. When I first
went out to help drop the seed I think I slowed the process with my
constant “this hole? is this a hole? where’s the next hole?” while
one of the boys had to keep picking up the seed and showing me where
to put it.
So today it was just me and Peter and no hoe so we either used
our bare hands or small shovels. The soil here is sometimes rock hard
and after a rain it clumps together even more so we weren’t making
much progress in our tiny field. Fortunately for me most of the local
bachelors around here are attracted to white skin so it wasn’t long
before “Stano” came by with a hoe and did all of the manual labor
while we followed behind with the seed.

The next day Laquita and I finished planting the rest on our own
since we didn’t want to take the kids away from their normal duties.
This area of land happens to be right next to one of the main dirt
roads so it gets a lot of foot traffic. We’re used to people staring
or giggling or little ones crying at the sight of us but today was
funny. I got out there first and started tilling when an older man
immediately came up to the fence and just stood there watching. He
said “Welcome” and then asked a question as he pointed to the ground.
His first question was “You know how to dig?” followed by “Where did
you get your training?”. I didn’t know what to say so I just replied,
“Texas…they dig there too.” Then he watched me and L for a bit longer
before telling us that he was leaving now. Another man came by asking
questions all in Swahili. We just tried answering any questions we
thought he might be asking while also using our ten words we know but
in the end he just kept saying “Hello” while looking at his phone. L
wondered if he was looking up English words and I wondered if he was
actually talking to someone on the phone since “Hello” is generally
used for phone greetings. After saying Hello back and forth about 32
times we decided to just keep going about our work until he got tired
of waiting for one of us to miraculously know the other’s language.
Even as he said good-bye it still came out as “Hello”.