To the farm...

Where did I leave off? Right, my farming adventures. After my tour of Gondola's sporting facilities, DB took me to meet a high school student named Isaac. DB had been helping Isaac with his English. DB's efforts were clearly paying off since Isaac and I were able to converse in English without any problems.

Like most people in Gondola (and Mozambique), Isaac's family are farmers. Issac, however, has different ambitions. His goals are to attend university to become an English teacher. While his goal seems completely reasonable, I found out that it wasn't necessarily that easy in Mozambique. He needs to be accepted into university and have the money to pay for tuition. If he successfully completes university, he needs to be lucky enough to secure a teaching job, which often involves knowing a school director or someone in the Ministry of Education. In addition to all of this, his family must stay healthy enough to manage the farm while he is away at school. If one of his parents falls ill, he will likely have to return from University to help out on the farm. After speaking with Isaac, I think he would make a fantastic English teacher, so I hope that he is able to achieve his goal.

Isaac decided to join us on the farm, so the three of us set-off from Gondola. The walk to the farm was beautiful. I felt like I was on a hike. The path we took was roughly one body width wide and we were surrounded by nature on all sides. We walked over hills, ravines and pastures. It was wonderfully peaceful. After 45 minutes, I started to wonder how far the farm was, but I just kept walking and walking. After another 45 minutes, we finally reached the farm. It took us 1.5 hours to get there! I couldn't believe that the farm was so far away from the town, which meant it was just as far from the market, schools, health centres etc.

Upon reach the farm, I met Rakesh, the eldest son of the farm's owner. Rakesh works on the farm while going to school. When we arrived, Rakesh had prepared a traditional lunch of sheema, which is thick cake-like porridge made of white corn flour. It was served with a small portion of vegetable stew. The sheema was shockingly thick: imagine mashed potatoes having a thick dough-like consistency. Sheema is pretty much the daily staple of people in this region, which is called Manica. Unfortunately, it has very little nutritional value, so one of the things that Africare has been doing is teaching people how to make fortified sheema.

After lunch, we finally got to work. Rakesh's farm was typical of most farms in Manica. Most of the land was used for subsistence crops like maize, sorghum and cassava. They had some cash crops like sunflower, sesame and beans. Most of the crops produced on the farm were low in nutritional value, so DB was helping them improve their nutritional intake by creating a garden with vegetables such as tomatoes, carrots, dark leafy greens, beets etc. Vegetables also serve as a good cash crop since they fetch a pretty good price at the market.

I helped them water their garden, which is done completely by hand since they do not have an irrigation system. Luckily, they had dug a well close to the garden, watering was pretty straight forward. After we watered the garden, we worked on turning some cleared fields into seedbeds. I helped till the soil using a hoe, basically I was breaking up the soil so that it is suitable for planting. After breaking up the soil, we used are hands to shape a seed bed. We then tilled the soil again to break it up some more. After the second tilling, we got our hands dirty. We used our hands to break up the soil as fine as possible. We also picked out rocks, clay pieces or random pieces garbage.

After our hands-on treatment, the seedbed was finally ready for planting. Earlier in the day, they had asked me what was my favourite vegetable. I responded with eggplant. They decided to plant eggplant in my honour, which made me feel pretty special. DB also promised to make them eggplant parmesan once they eggplant is harvested! The planting process was pretty straight-forward. We made lines in the seedbed with a stick, dropped seeds into the lines, covered up the seeds with soil and watered thoroughly. DB told me that the seeds should germinate within 3-5 days and that after 3-4 weeks they would transfer the seedlings to the main garden, at which point they would space out the plants to let them grow properly. Most excitingly, they should have some eggplant 5-6 weeks after the transplant.

After we finished planting the eggplant, the sun was starting to set (which happens around 5pm here), so we collected our stuff and headed back up to Rakesh's house. We enjoyed a quick snack of mandioca, a startchy tuber similar to potatoes or taro, and then headed back to Gondola. Mid-way through our walk, the sun had set and we were basically walking in the dark. Lucky for me, I had two experienced tour guides and nothing to carry. During our walk back, we passed a group of women who were carrying what looked to be large bags of maize on their head. In the complete dark! And it's not like it's an easy walk. They had to cross several ravines, which were bridged using a couple of logs. It was absolutely amazing! They were also carrying a radio, so at least they had some entertainment during their walk.

After getting back to Gondola, DB and I hitched a ride back to Chimoio. It was a fantastic way to spend a day and I can't wait until Rakesh and his family receive their first eggplant harvest!