Field Trip

I’ve been bugging Magloire for awhile to show me his fields – I’m very curious to see farms here since cultivation is huge element of most Cameroonians’ lives. Every morning when I go running I always see people dressed in drab, dirty, holey clothes heading out to their fields, machete perched on their heads or hanging loosely in their hands. It always makes me chuckle too, when I think about how Americans might respond if everyday, farmers headed down the streets of say, New York, for example, casually waving a machete at passerby’s in greeting.
Anyhow, he said to be ready to go out at 7:30 AM, to which I replied, “that’s a bit late, isn’t it?” The sun starts to come up here around 6 AM, and Magloire had told me before that if he’s going to work his fields, he’ll usually head out at 6 AM. He replied that he didn’t want to disturb me, but I said, don’t worry about me, just tell me when to be ready to go. So I woke up at 5:45 AM yesterday to meet him at around 6:10. We walked about a half hour out to his uncle’s field.
What’s interesting about fields here is that they’re totally in the forest and there aren’t really discernible or obvious boundaries between the farms and the surrounding forest. So we turned off the main road onto a small footpath headed right into the forest. Along the way he pointed out all sorts of different plants – palm trees (from which people cultivate palm nuts, which are pressed to make palm oil), the difference between plantain and banana trees (plantain tree trunks are yellow; banana tree trunks are black), both wild and domestic mangoes, cocoa trees, coffee plants, manioc plants. Every now and again, he would exclaim in surprise, “Beck-kah! You can’t recognize coffee plants?!” I think he’s having trouble understanding how the whole domain of farming and cultivation is totally foreign to me. To which I try to explain, “Magloire, I grew up in cities. Have you ever seen a field in the middle of Douala or Yaoundé?” His response: “Well, not fields, but they have mango trees at least.” Oof.
In any case, the field trip (haha, no pun intended) was really fun and informative, not to mention beautiful. Afterwards he headed out of the forest and down the road to his much smaller field where, the day before yesterday, he had cut down three stalks of bananas. He said we would carry them back to village on our heads. I still haven’t mastered that skill (or even really tried… it’s pretty intimidating) though I know enough about it to know that the trick is that people wrap a piece of cloth in a circle and put that on their heads before loading whatever it is they’re carrying. The “coussin” (or “cushion”) gives a more flat surface to work with and helps stabilize the load. We hadn’t brought any cloth to use as coussins, so instead, Magloire fashioned coussins for us out of dead banana leaves. Next thing you know, I was walking back to village with a stalk of bananas perched on my head, greeting passerby’s in Tikar. Granted, I was still using one hand to stabilize my load the entire way, but still. Yesterday, for a short time at least, I was hardcore fulfilling objectives two and three of Peace Corps service: cultural exchange.