The Joy of Life is Love

Our last day on the farm was supposed to be pretty straight-forward: Kakasii and I would make a quick run to Moshi to buy feed for the cows and chickens while Anita and Mazaa would pack up and then we’d be on our way home to Arusha.

It didn’t quite work out like that, though. Just before breakfast, Kakasii got a call from our neighbor Wera. He had been cutting banana leaves to feed his cows and had severely cut his arm. He needed a ride to the hospital.

Let me try to explain exactly how Wera was cutting the banana leaves so you can get a sense of how such an injury might occur: banana plants grow pretty tall so in order to cut the leaves down you must tie a very sharp knife to the end of a very long pole. Then you sorta jerk the knife to get a cut through the leaf stem. As Wera was doing that, the knife came loose from the pole and fell, hitting Wera’s arm on the way down. It’s really a blessing that he wasn’t more seriously injured.

I was grateful that I had retrained in first aid when I was back in the States this spring so I felt prepared to help Wera. I was also happy we were driving our Land Cruiser which is equipped with a first aid kit (and much more useful than the zip-lock bag of band-aids and tube of antibiotic cream I had packed to have at the farm).

We picked up Wera, I did what I could to treat the injury and then we took him to Moshi to the hospital to get several stitches and a tetanus shot.

After our other errands in Moshi, we went back to the farm to grab a quick bite to eat, finish the packing and then headed home. But before we left we got to see the brand new baby chicks that had hatched earlier that day.

And, just like I said in my post about our first day on the farm, Max and Elly learned about the circle of life. One rooster left this world in order to provide us with food, and seven new chicks came into the world a few days later. (Cue the soundtrack to The Lion King.)

The third day of your visit to the shamba was the main reason we made the trip: we were scheduled to have access to the river water for irrigating our coffee trees and banana plants. We pay an annual fee to access the river water and then on our scheduled days we hire some local workers to help channel the water to our farm.

It was a super-long day for Kakasii because he had to get up about 2 a.m. to gather the workers and get started. It’s an all-day job of hard work.

As the water made its way to our farm through a series of canals, the workers started digging trenches throughout our coffee trees and banana plants to give them all a good drink of water.

Four men worked on the trenches throughout the day. Once one area of the farm was well-irrigated, they would block those trenches and direct the water into another series of trenches.

Kakasii supervised, with some help from Max and Elly. Here is Max doing quality control on the amount of mud produced by the irrigation:

When Max got bored of supervising, he found other entertainment, including climbing a tree.

He got a pretty good start up it himself, and then got a boost from Wera, our neighbor. It will only be a matter of time before Max is able to get up that high himself. I warned Kakasii that we’re going to need to keep a close eye on Max whenever we’re at the farm–I know from personal experience how much trouble a kid can find on a farm.

Meanwhile, Elly took an interest in picking coffee.

Unfortunately, we had just had the ripe coffee harvested so Elly was picking unripe coffee from our trees.

The fruit of a coffee trees are called cherries. There are two coffee beans inside each cherry. Ripe coffee cherries are red; unripe cherries, like below, are green. The cherries ripen at different rates so we have the coffee harvested multiple times each year. Because there are both ripe and unripe cherries on the coffee tree at the same time, the harvesting process cannot be mechanized. It must be done by hand so the coffee picker can choose only the cherries that are ready for harvest.

Coffee grown on Mt. Kilimanjaro is very good quality because of the volcanic soil and high altitude. The coffee is also shade-grown, protected by a canopy of tall trees and banana plants so the cherries don’t ripen too fast. (This is all stuff I learned when I was managing the LWR Coffee Project during my time at Lutheran World Relief. It’s all coming in quite handy now as the wife of a Kilimanjaro coffee farmer.)

Although there are several types of bananas grown on Mount Kilimanjaro, the type we grow are green bananas, sometimes called cooking bananas. They are similar to a plantain and used similarly to how Americans use potatoes: roasted, fried, boiled. A common use for the Chagga people is in mtori (banana stew), which Max and Elly both love.

About midday the irrigation workers took a break for lunch. They ate makande (maize) and beans, and washed it down with a local brew made from bananas and finger millet called mbege.

As the day went on, Max and Elly came back to the house. Max played with a homemade toy that belongs to Juma, the son of our farmhand, Waziri.

Elly found a little mischief in the kitchen. Anita was shredding cabbage to cook for supper and Elly grabbed a handful and threw it on the floor. So she got a lesson from Mommy in how to use a broom.

By suppertime the irrigation work was all done and Kakasii was completely exhausted after having been up since 2 a.m. that morning. We ate our supper (chicken stew, cooked cabbage and rice) and called it a day.

Up bright an early today for another big day on the shamba! Max and Elly have been learning to brush their teeth and are quite enthusiastic about it. They like to flash me a big smile when they are done to show me what a good job they did.

Yes, the bathroom sink is outside. In case you are wondering, we do have a flush toilet and hot water in our shower; we just have to walk outside the house to access them.

After breakfast and teeth brushing, it was time for Max and Kakasii to check on our cows and bulls as they grazed in our front yard.

You can’t really tell from this photo, but the bull on the far left is a real bad-ass. He is very aggressive and should have been turned into hamburger months ago (in my opinion). Kakasii’s opinion is to wait a little bit longer and sell it closer to Christmas when the price will be higher. Many Chagga (the people from Mt. Kilimanjaro) who have moved away from the village come back to Kilimanjaro for Christmas and have big parties and family gatherings. The cost of meat rises with that demand.

A bit later in the morning, while the cows were still grazing in the front yard, an old woman approached our yard. There’s a footpath just to the side that leads around our property and connects to another road. That’s where she was headed but Kakasii was concerned that she might get a little too close to the bull and it would charge her so he went to move it farther away from the footpath.

And that’s when it happened.

The bull didn’t charge the old woman, but it did charge Kakasii! It pushed him back behind the hedge of bougainvillea and down onto the ground among the coffee trees and banana plants. The kids and I had been sitting on the front porch with Kakasii before he went to move the bull, so we witnessed the attack. Anita was there, too, so I handed Max to her and ran…to do what, I don’t know. Did I think I was going to be able to save Kakasii from the bull? I didn’t have time to think about anything, I just ran in the direction of where Kakasii and the bull were. Fortunately, Kakasii had the presence of mind to shout to me to stay away. Had I gotten any closer the bull likely would have then charged me. So I stopped dead in my tracks and waited until Kakasii appeared from behind the bougainvillea, brushing the dirt off, seemingly uninjured (later he discovered some scratches and bruising on his side and rear end where the bull got him–fortunately, the bull’s horns are bent inward so he wasn’t able to gore him).

Even after all of that, Kakasii still thinks we should wait until closer to Christmas to sell that darn bull.

After we all recovered from the emotional trama of the bull attack, it was time for more visiting. First we visited Kakasii’s mom’s younger sister.  We showed up totally unannounced and, true to Tanzanian culture, she stopped what she was doing to receive us. She wanted to send someone to the nearby duka (shop) to buy sodas for us but we were only able to stay a few minutes so we declined.

[Side story: The man in the photo is Frank, Kakasii’s half-brother. Kakasii’s father, Joseph, was of the generation of Tanzanian men that had multiple wives. Kakasii’s father had five. Three of his own (Kakasii’s mom was the first wife) and then later two more who had been wives of Kakasii’s grandfather, Wariskao, that were still of child-bearing age when Wariskao died.]

Then it was on to visit Kakasii’s shangazi (fraternal aunt). Before reaching her house we stopped at a duka to buy her some sugar–it’s also a common custom to take zawadi (a gift) when visiting respected family members, usually something like sugar or tea. As at our first visit, Shangazi also wanted to treat us to a soda. We declined, but since it was Max and Elly’s snack time, we peeled a few oranges and sweet fingerling bananas so they could eat and share with the other children there.

The end of another fun day on the shamba. Time to get some sleep to be well-rested for church the next morning–expecting at least a 2-hour service!