Gathering groundnuts!

I followed Fatou and Sinni to the groundnut field because for several afternoons that’s where they’d been going -- I finally had time to join. I thought we’d be bringing back armloads of groundnut plants, but I quickly realized that’s not the plan. The fields, overflowing with green the last time I’d been (but that’d been months ago) were dried wastelands of sand.

The women get to work—they tie a cloth around their waists as a pouch and, hoe in hand, scrape away dirt and feel through it for groundnuts, which are picked up and placed in the pouch. After maybe an hour’s work each woman has a medium-sized bowl's worth of the leftover, forgotten groundnuts. I do not have a hoe, so I am not allowed to help. Fatou Bobo says even if I did have a hoe I wouldn’t be able to work. I think I probably could, but it does look uncomfortable.

So I sit silently on a stump for awhile. I couldn’t really follow their conversation because not only were they speaking quickly to themselves, they were spread out and difficult to hear. Sinni says I am being quiet and I say this is because I cannot hear all they are saying. They laugh at this, probably because “you don’t hear what is said” is an expression you’d say to a stubborn child who’s refusing to listen.

Fatou Bobo explains that they were talking about how one woman’s husband beat her last night and at Tobaski another’s husband had beaten her. So that’s probably another reason you’d go to a hot and dried-out groundnut field to gather a bowlful of groundnuts. Because you can’t very well talk about how your husband beats you when he’s just around the corner.