I tell stories about my grandmother’s garden to anyone who will listen. Some Sundays I meet with friends to share stories. Our agenda, at the restaurant last Sunday afternoon, was to eat salads and talk about life. When the salads came my friend shouted, Jaman! - a Swahili expression calling attention to an alarming issue. She then said, “Do you know that in places where vegetables are grown, they are being sprayed. Nowadays, tomatoes, are sprayed with chemicals when they are as young as seedlings. Spraying is done at every stage; flowering, setting fruits, before harvesting and actually after harvesting so that they don’t go bad. Since I found this out, I don’t eat salads containing tomatoes”.
Another friend gave us some interesting information on the field work she had done to assess crop pollination in vegetable growing areas around town. Her assignment was to count the number of insects visiting a designated square patch in selected farms in the area. He told us, “To my surprise and agony, I stood for more than one hour, in a flowering maize plot, without spotting a single bee. This story made my mind race back to my grandmother’s garden for shelter. But, I also remembered things I had read from newspapers abroad of places where pollination does not take place naturally and farmers buy colonies of bees to pollinate orchards. My mind went back to the wasps and bee-stings that were normal in my grandmothers’ garden and wondered whether what my friend was saying was really happening in my country. Back then, it would have been impossible to spend an hour not seeing an insect on every square foot of ground in the garden. I did not want to believe my friends story, but I’d say that one hour of apparently no life in the insect world is really a stretch of the imagination. That would simply never happen in my grandmother’s garden.
“Not far from here”, another friend said, “I worked with a community where the farm owners insisted on spraying crops until a shadow mark was left on the ground and the leaves were soaked in tears”. “This”, she said, “had been going on for nine years”. I couldn’t imagine how many insects had been smashed out over this period. Communities have certainly become richer with more money to spend from casual labor even though they ingest the sprays, mix the chemicals and inhale fumes and droplets from the spray guns. One of my friends said, “Did you see the African eggplant farm we passed down the road? “Yes”, we replied in chorus. At the back of my mind, and of course to the best of my knowledge, African eggplants are among vegetables that are not sprayed along with potato leaves, cassava leaves, pumpkin leaves and local amaranth. My friend went on, “Actually, the egg plants were not sprayed, but they were sold on the ground where the spray was mixed yesterday.
Three of our friends came in late for the meeting and joined our discussion midstream. One of them said, “Farmers are always encouraged to wear protective gear when spraying their crops because the chemicals are poisonous, but farmers are scared and don’t use them for many reasons. For one, the clothing brings too much heat, making people sweaty, sticky and slippery on warm days – which is most days of the year! The gear is not only uncomfortable, it is expensive too and some of the protective gear makes it difficult to go to the toilet”. The other late comer said, “Anyhow, many farmers cannot intellectually reconcile themselves to understand that they are being asked to spray food with unsafe chemicals they will feed their children, customers and friends. The Swahili word for these chemicals is “Sumu”. Sumu is used to kill things. Farmers wonder why they are supposed to use Sumu on food. Sumu is something to be feared, it kills, and has no alternative meaning, purpose or explanation. “In my family we use Sumu for rats”, said my friend, “and whenever Sumu was put in the kitchen or storerooms, vigilance was needed to ensure that nobody used the pots and edible food that was set as bait for the rats… The hunt, search and smell of dead rats was always unbearable. We called in my brother to do the undertaker job of removing dead rats…he would chase us all around the house holding them by their tails before throwing them into the rubbish pit”. The third latecomer said, “How can we safely use unsafe substances?”. How can Sumu be used to produce food, that is supposed to give health and well-being?” Nobody said anything.
It was getting late and I would have to leave the meeting soon, but none of my friends seemed ready to go home yet, so I stayed on. “During the harvest season”, my friend began, “the nickname for laborer’s who are hired to pick crops from the field are called “Cargo”. They are presumably called “Cargo” because they carry the crops from the field in buckets to weighing stations where they are paid every day, so long as they meet the stipulated seven buckets by the end of the day. If they do not meet the target, they are not paid a cent. But many are happy to get work on the farms anyway because they have families to feed and fees to pay for their school going children”. However, as we talked about life in the village where the “Cargo” lived, the conversation tuned in to the beautiful young women who were not giving birth. “They are not as strong as the women in my grandmother’s garden”, I said “do you see any young women in the Cargo squads?" But my other friend said, “it is because of the endless bending all day and the smell of the harvest spray… you can’t do this work and keep a baby... I know a man who is making so much money spraying crops for the market that he bought two motorbikes in three months… I hear he is planning to buy a pickup… but, people don’t know that he has another farm on which he grows food for his family to eat. On that farm he does not spray anything and he told his young wife never to visit the market farm… You know how people talk…. Someone told me that he has scales on his back from carrying the tank he uses to spray the crops for the market.”. Finally, I had to drag myself away from the meeting. I made the excuse that I had to get ready for work tomorrow. What I did not tell them was that they had given me a lot to think about.
"Stories from our changing environment"
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