Tomatoes

Growing up I was used to seeing endless green pastures and fields of corn, soy, wheat. I even knew how to milk a cow, though the only pets we ever had were dogs.
Well, we had a goat for a few days, but it ate my mother’s prize roses and she sent it packing. I was very much in sync with harvest times back then.

Now I live in a city full of buzzing cars and screaming sirens. Even on my roof deck I don’t see the stars as I did when I was a child. There is no smell of new mown grass, or large green and yellow rectangles spreading for miles reflecting the crops that were growing. And so it was when I left Cape Charles I happened upon workers harvesting crops.

At first I saw a field with lots of old school buses and passed it by. But then, I saw the migrant workers a few yards down the road going into green fields and I had to stop. I wanted to see what harvesting looked like now.

It will come as no surprise that the workers were all Mexican. They reminded me some of the sugar cane workers in Kenya. And then I saw their faces and no one was smiling or laughing. In Kenya there is always time to laugh and joke while harvesting because there is much more equality among the farmers. They don’t import people to do their dirty work. Everyone does the dirty work.

These lean, sweat stained men, here on Cape Charles were out picking green tomatoes and piling them into baskets which went onto a truck. They were serious and strained.The truck then took the tomatoes to a processing plant where they are gassed and saved for distribution in 2-3 months. How do I know this, because I stopped to take this photo and the overseer looked at me suspiciously as if I were a reporter for a newspaper or someone from INS. I quickly flipped into my Kenyan English explaining that I wanted to take photos to send back to the workers in Kenya to see how we farm.
It did the trick, I got the photos.

Later on, as I left the fields, I began to think about farming more. How odd it would seem to an African to harvest green tomatoes and use gadgets and processes to turn them an unnatural red. I kind of felt that way too. While I can see so many advances that would help my Kenyan friends, i.e. silos, I wouldn’t want all of our advances to get over there. Most certainly I wouldn’t want to lose the flashing white smiles and laughter that their harvests bring…and I kept on driving.

Silos

I drove down to Cape Charles on Friday. Cape Charles is an old railroad town on the Chesapeake Bay. Its homes are neatly stacked next to each other, shining pinks and greens, wide verandas with old wicker rocking chairs. The nights are sultry and soft.

It was while driving through the farmland on the way down, that I found myself caught in thoughts about here and Kenya. When I come home from Kenya, since I live in the city, while it’s difficult to adjust, there is little similarity to disarm me, so it’s not too bad. Driving on the smooth, straight roads, flat and wide I found myself startled by the rows of crops. Cornfields stretched along side of me, clipped and watered by a system that hung overhead. Next to the corn was what looked like my old friend millet and soy. Crops are rotated, fed well and watered. Next to most farms stood a large building with a circular roof. I remembered them well from my childhood. Silos! Silos hold the harvested grain, keeping it from rotting and allowing it to be sold at the best times. Those farms, which don’t have silos, have the convenience of either having a shared one with a neighbor or one less than a mile away at a crossroad or a small town.

What a vast difference from what I see in Kenya. It is not that the rows of corn are messy, just a bit haphazard. Dust from the unpaved roads blows over it willy-nilly. There is no irrigation system, so the stalks open their mouths to the sky hoping for a drink of water, or bend down with rot when too much water beats them into the ground. When farmers harvest the crop they must take it right to market. There are no well-kept farms with silos to hold the crops; in fact there are no grain storage facilities for miles and miles. It is almost impossible for a farmer to get it to a silo and so the grain must be sold immediately or they risk the probability of rot.

As I drove along I also saw livestock. Goats frolicked on verdant grass, kept safe by clean white fences. These were not the exhausted goats I saw on the roads or in the towns of Nambale, Kisi, or Busia. Chickens were kept in gynormous air-conditioned coops, out of the sun and resting until their ultimate demise. No working for living for these animals

It set my mind to thinking about so many things. The abundance of facilities and mechanisms we have to make farming easier was everywhere. What it would mean to a farmer in Africa to have a watering system which would help him tame one of the elements. It would literally change his world. But even more than that, a silo to store the grain in each village would allow the farmers a cooperative and a way of helping them climb out of poverty.

As a child a silo was a magical place where I would watch them pour the grain from a long shoot into the top of the roof. You always fill from the bottom up. The smell around them was warm with the scent of the wheat or the corn. I would stand there with my father and watch them fill. He would always warn me that they were dangerous places as well, since if you fell into one, you could literally drown in the grain. Now they take on a totally different meaning for me. Now I know that silos would mean a new beginning for the farmers of Nambale, a new way of life and as I slide down to road toward Cape Charles I wonder how we could make that happen.