There is a Season

To honor Pete Seeger’s recent passing, I title this blog after his pretty swell retrofitting of the Book of Ecclesiastes into a pretty sweet song. He was an anthropologist of song.

If you’ve ever commented to a teacher that they made a good career choice because they get the summers off, I bet you were very poorly received--especially if such a comment was made to my father.  Farming is another profession prone to critiques of time spent lollygagging.  This is not so true. 

The dry season is opportune for putting new fencing up around gardens that people keep around their homes.  Fences are essential for keeping out roaming goats, sheep, pigs, and anthropologists prone to tactile methods of observation. 

Anthropology is well adapted to documenting how economic and social activities change throughout the year.  We’re long term researchers and  enmeshed in the communities we’re researching.  One of the principle methods of anthropology is observation.  When I’m not asking people questions, I’m constantly scanning my surroundings and looking for things, actions, and behaviors that will tell me something about life in the rural Upper West during the dry season.  The things that I see are just as important as the things that I ask about--sometimes more so.  If I ask people what they do during the dry season they will sometimes respond that they do nothing because they are not farming.  This is not so true. I've observed a lot of this "nothingness" that is happening. 

Just as teachers spend their "dry seasons" working on things like curriculum, professional development, and lesson plans, the dry season for farmers is about hustling. 

If you are the head of a large family that likes to eat a lot of fufu, it's necessary to have new mortars that can withstand the pounding.   The dry season is the season for making new mortars as is shown here. 

The dry season is, perhaps, mostly about building.  People are refurbishing existing house structures and building new ones. 

Such building is always time and labor intensive.  If people are using local materials to build mud brick, the first step in the process is to make the bricks. This involves digging deep holes, hauling water, mixing mud, hauling the mud to a brick making station, and then giving the bricks an opportunity to bake in the sun. 

The next step involves assembling.

For households transitioning from mud brick to cement brick, the process is not only time and labor intensive, but also quite expensive.  One bag of cement costs approximately $10.  This bag of cement will form 30 cement blocks.  30 cement blocks can build about 1/3 of a one wall for a small room.  Money for building cement block homes comes from different  strategies. Some farmers are selling their recent groundnut harvest (aka peanuts, the only viable commercial crop for farmers here) even though groundnut prices are currently quite low.  Others are doing day labor in Wa, a large town about 10 kilometers away and one that is booming in size because of the growth of a university.   They spend the day  shovelling sand into a dump truck to be used in the construction industry.  They earn about $4-7 for their day labor. They then spend some of that money on buying  cement for their own homes as well as save some for the cost of inputs for farming. These cement block homes are often works in progress for years. Think about this the next time some media outlet demerits some African's home as a "shack." 

For 3 years a farmer has been selling his groundnut harvest to put up this house.  

The dry season is also about gathering stuff from the bush (countryside).  Men have more time to go hunting and fishing during the dry season. Women have more time to spend gathering firewood, burning charcoal and gathering wild foods. All such activities are vital to procuring income and enhancing food security.  These are the things that I need to know about so that I can understand the bigger picture of household management--how people make decisions about how to earn and spend money throughout the year, not just during the farming season. Farming is never the only story for farming families. 

A dam where fishing occurs with weighted throw nets as well as set up catch nets. 

Demonstration of a bird trap

The stems of the vogaa flower (collected from a tree).  The flowers are used in the preparation of soup. Like so many of the soup ingredients here (especially okra), the ingredient is said to be nice because it makes the soup slippery. Slippery soup works well for the staple starchy porridges that are consumed here.  The slippery soups coat the porridges very well, ensuring that you get the flavor of the soup with every bite of starch.