My Groundnut Narrative

One of the teachers last year said I should help out with planting groundnuts. He said I could have my own little plot of land to farm and then afterward I would have a narrative to share with the people in America.

After school that day I told Neene that the teachers think I should help farm groundnuts. She said, “But we do not have any groundnuts to plant.” Then she asked me, without really asking me, if I would buy five hundred dalasis worth of groundnuts for planting. I agreed, because what kind of a groundnut narrative would I have otherwise?

Unfortunately, I was unable to help plant the groundnuts because I went on vacation during planting time. When I returned, the groundnuts had already sprouted. Except for Neene’s. She said the rains did not come after she planted her groundnuts and all of them died. However, a few weeks later she asked for the peanut butter maker to be brought from Kombo. I wondered of what use the machine would be without peanuts, but I decided to buy the machine anyway.

Now the groundnuts are ripe (I guess some of them grew after all), which mans we were able to discover that I bought the wrong sort of peanut butter machine. Actually, it is not even a peanut butter machine at all, but a machine that grinds unroasted peanuts into a powder for those times when you want to cook nyankatong. I guess that’s what happens when you buy a peanut machine from a man whose shop is filled with electronics. Amadou has reassured me it’s okay, people will come and pay a dalasi to use the machine, and I am not alone in making this mistake. There is one man who lives over there, he also bought this type of machine when he wanted the other kind.

This concludes my groundnut narrative.