Farming Season

(photos to come pending functional internet)
When the long-awaited rains finally come in, the tone of Nalerigu shifts in subtle, but perceptible ways.
The town empties out during seemingly random hours, before and after which you see men walking hand-made hoes leaned on dirty shoulders back from their farm acres. Goats and pigs, usually left to wander in and out of traffic and yards indiscriminately, are tied to anything and everything they cannot wrest from the ground--an act of protection for the maize shoots newly sprouting everywhere. On my walk home from work I hear the repetitive "thwack" and "thud" of hand-ploughing as every patch of fertile land surrounding compounds and other buildings is softened and converted into garden patches by women, children, and young men. Tractors roll in and out of narrow footpaths, reaching impasse after impasse with donkey-drawn carts, motorbikes, and water-carriers. School attendance wanes as family farms become priority; schools lie dormant when it rains, with no students or teachers able to trek through the pounding elements to wake the colourful buildings up. Lush green overtakes the red Ghana dust as weeds, ground cover, and eventually crops all spring into frantic growth. It is a time of work, but not of anxiety--provided the rains are good.
This year, it appears they are not. I am told by veterans of Nalerigu that by this late in the season, the rains should be every day, instead of the every-four-day schedule meteorology has roughly endowed us with. Nalerigu natives try to keep their optimism up, no doubt as a means of protection against the memory of the inordinate damage of last year's drought and flood. Food aid still streams into East Mamprusi to raise the burden of farmers that lost not only their homes and belongings, but the very topsoil that keeps them alive, to the rush of water south from Burkina last September. Though it makes me uneasy, I am glad for the aid this time--if just to give these farmers an opportunity to sow again, and try to rebuild their foundations.
We at PARED are just as affected by the difference in pull the farming season exerts. Farms and farmers become priority as we engage in the CIFS Food Security Initiative proposal process, late due to rains and the aforementioned lack of anxiety many experience during this season. The busy nature of these few months pose difficulties with this CIFS process: ploughing and sowing season is not the best window in which to request the time, thought, effort and dedication of subsistence farmers literally ploughing for their lives. Unfortunately, the timeline was not ours to choose: CIDA, possibly remembering the ease of summer vacations past, calls the shots on the FSI's with the snapping of purse strings and the urgency to help.
It rained very early this morning, after a day of scorching temperatures and blistering sun. Already the ground is dry, reverting to the sandy guinea savanna it is, from the fertile croplands we need it to be. Nevertheless, all around me on my walk to work I see maize leaves struggling towards the sun, more proof of this nation's dogged determination to survive.