1.21.08 It takes a village… to pound the millet. Millet is a staple in this region, a grain used to feed families for generations. Whole grain is small, seed-like, and yellow/red-brown. Pounded, the hull is broken and becomes a nutritious cereal used with rice. Milled, it is a flour and made into a porridge served regularly in households throughout West Africa.
Taking a walk before sunset out into the bush, beyond the edges of the village we found cow paths in the dry peanut stubble in sandy soil leading in various directions. Eventually, we heard a working engine and found a large group of villagers coming to the end of the day’s hard work. A village-owned tractor was running an attached millet processor. Large stalks of millet which had been drying in storage for months were brought out into the bush by multiple charets (horse-drawn flatbed carts). Together they lifted the bundles, bound by handmade rope from the baobob tree, into the thresher. Various groups of women in twos and threes were pounding the millet in large wood vats (mortar and pestle style). Others were sifting the chaff, pouring it slowly in the light breeze. Young boys carried away plastic tubs on their heads full of the milled flour, winding along sandy paths to their waiting thatched roof huts or cement block compounds. From a distance, a cloud of dust and chaff could be seen hanging over the still-working teams of men, women, and children.
It was a beautiful scene at the end of the day that told many stories of communal dependence – depending on one another for work and for sustenance. Individualism cannot survive here. This year’s peanut crop nearly failed for lack of good rain. The millet crop has been scarce for the same reason. Now, they are using up their precious stores of grain. Before the next harvest, local resources will be severely stretched. This was a precious moment to me, knowing this village’s willingness to share with one another in abundance and need. What a biblical example, seen in the context of Muslim village culture.
