Honey!

For a few days in June, some fellow volunteers came to my village to collect honey and hold a beekeeping workshop; when asked if I'd like to join I replied: "YES."

I'm actually going to write enough about this adventure to require multiple paragraphs of sizeable length. A nicer person would even transition these paragraphs nicely from one to the other. I just wanted you to be aware that I've made no attempt to do so.

I always wondered how people got stung beekeeping, because the head-to-toe suit looks pretty secure, but now I know. You get stung because at some point you remove the suit. You might wait and wait before removing the suit, but the bees will also wait and wait because, after all, you’re covered in stolen honey. And once the suit is gone... Also, you might get stung because, as happened to one of the village beekeepers, there might be a tear in your suit that you don't notice until a mass of bees finds it, flies into your suit, and stings your face. I didn’t get stung on my face (Allah, jaraama!) and escaped with just two refreshing stings on the back of my neck and one on my right thumb.

I like the suits. They’re white with elastic in the legs and arms. Around our feet we wrapped empty rice bags, secured with thick black elastic. On our hands we had rubber gloves, similarly secured with the thick elastic straps. I felt like I was about to conduct experiments on Ebola infected blood samples or something because I was stark white from head to toe except for rubber gloves the color of biohazard bins. The suits were fun at first because you could pretend you were a scientist or an astronaut or a beekeeper but after a short while they got hot and heavy. Worst was after we’d finished collecting the honey and were just standing in the field waiting for the bees to fly away. There is nothing to distract you from how uncomfortable the suit has become, only evil little breezes that remind you how fantastic you’d feel if handfuls of buzzing bees weren't preventing you from stripping off the suit. But even though the end of the honey-collecting excursion is miserable--you’re hot, thirsty, tired in an unhappy way and you’d love to just collapse--the beginning is so fantastically magical that the next day when you’re asked if you'd like to collect honey again this evening you forget all about the ending.

Levi came along the first day of honey collecting. Several bees stung him but he refused to run away for at least a full minute. Instead, he yelped and bounced around in twisty comical leaps. He was probably in a lot of pain but I could only laugh and shout, "Levi! A hootata? Won't you go home?" (I'm training him to be bilingual). The next day he followed us again but this time he sprinted away after the first sting and didn’t slow down until he was nearly out of sight.

There was this moment when a screen of honey had been lifted and a flashlight shone behind it and someone was pumping smoke over the whole thing and it was beautiful. Just fantastically beautiful and the honey looked like glowing, dripping, amber, the kind without dead bugs.

I left school early on Tuesday to help them process the honey. It was okay because I wasn’t teaching any classes that day anyway, since the twelfth graders were finished with final exams. When I got to the agriculture center, the Gambian men were churning honey combs through a machine that’d been donated to them, while us toubabs did it the old-fashioned way. We scooped dripping honey combs from one bucket  and squeezed the honey combs over another bucket covered with fabric. Squeezing the honey combs until oozing, glistening honey drips between your fingers is really really fun. Then we swirled the honey around on the surface of the fabric with the excuse that the swirling helped push the honey through the fabric but with the real reason that we liked the feel of honey running through our fingers.

I am addicted to honey now. I'll scoop it into my oatmeal every morning, or I’ll spread peanut butter on bread and dip it into honey, or I’ll just eat the honey plain. But nothing tastes as good as that first taste did, after our first night collecting honey. We’d taken off our suits and our bodies were cool again and we were about to part ways and return to our respective compounds when someone pointed out that we should get to taste the honey so someone handed me a honey comb and I bit into it and honey poured into my mouth and oozed out of the wax and it was glorious.

One afternoon a few days later, E.B. asked if I’d ever tasted honey. I told him yes and he said before you eat honey you should add sugar. I questioned the need to do this and Pippi Isatou agreed that even honey alone is sweet.