My Rice Crop

Edmund Blair Bolles

Getting more than we gave has been the experience of most Peace Cops Volunteers.

I said, “Have a shoe,” and handed the headmaster’s wife a potato from the school garden.

Exchanges like that happened when I pushed the edge of my Swahili skills.

I excuse myself: there is a similarity between the word for shoe, kiatu, and the one for potato, kiazi, but strangers in a strange land tend to be ridiculous, never more so than when they try to adopt some of the local ways.

There was the time I took my sixth and seventh graders out to transplant rice from the nursery to the farmland. In theory, this project was an important demonstration of a better way to grow rice, the village’s staple crop. Transplanting was a proven way to increase yield per acre: I knew that because it said so on the sheet of mimeographed paper that the Peace Corps had given me; I was in no position to doubt it: I didn’t know what rice in a nursery looked like.

Flashback to the first night of Peace Corps training. One of the women in the group dropped her voice and asked, “Do any of you know about farming?”

The cat had popped from the bag. We were all typical Volunteers, fresh out of school, bright-eyed and citified, knowing nothing about farming. Yet somehow we had been selected to teach agriculture to the primary-school children of subsistence farmers.

We did bring enthusiasm to our task, running to find and grab a hoe when there were not enough to go around. We didn’t want to miss the chance to work under the summer sun. And when it came time for one of us to volunteer to castrate a lamb, I stepped forward.

Truth be told I had no idea what I was doing. I knew zilch about farming and zilch about Africa. That means I knew zilch squared about African farming. During training, we consoled ourselves with the witticism, “Farming can’t be that tough, or so many people wouldn’t be doing it.” It turned out to be not so easy.

No, wait! There was something easy—radishes. I popped radish seeds into the soil and in no time at all, even without much rain, I had a row of salad vegetables. Forty-five days from planting to harvest with no maintenance. Now that’s easy. It was also pointless. The people didn’t eat radishes and didn’t like radishes. And I couldn’t eat a fifty-yard-long row of radishes by myself.

Eggs were easy, too. Almost every villager had a few chickens free-ranging, scratching a living from the ground and providing the occasional egg as a bonus for its “owner.” Rooster-doodle-do echoed around the teachers’ houses every dawn. I had some hens of my own. The Peace Corps had provided me with the leghorn and two New Hampshire reds I kept cooped up behind my house. They were twice the size of the village birds. One of the local roosters eventually discovered their presence and used to hang around outside my chicken wire making eyes at them.

Between my three birds, I got two eggs a day. There was always a white one from the leghorn and a brown one from the reds. Every so often the reds outdid themselves, and I had a three-egg omelet for breakfast. My students were thunderstruck by the fertility of the birds and the size of the eggs. Their own birds did not deliver eggs with any kind of regularity, and the eggs they did manage were small, not quite robin’s-egg sized.

The villagers could see that eggs flowed onto my table like honey and were properly impressed. Even so, they were not ready to follow my example because, while my eggs came easily, they were not free. The only reason my birds stayed fat and fertile was that I fed them every day. I made a feeder (probably half of the practical things I have ever made in my life were made during my Peace Corps years) and bought large bags of feed at a store a hundred miles away. Who could afford that? By American standards, the eggs were very inexpensive; by the lights of a Tanzanian villager they were prohibitive.

The kind of farming the villagers did was hard work. Preparing the ground was just plain backbreaking labor, and then harvesting was even more painful. “Stoop labor” we call a lot of that harvest work. I found I could do it for no more than five minutes without keeling over. Picking tomatoes while bending over a plant is not as immediately exhausting as using a hoe to build a ridge for planting, but the blood rushing to the head made me dizzy. The students were more determined than I and lasted longer, but they didn’t find it much easier.

One of the lessons I learned in the Peace Corps is that hard work is hard work, no matter who you are. You’d think I would have known that before going to Africa, and in a way I did, but there is knowing and then knowing. First-hand knowing is best and before the Peace Corps, I knew very little at first hand.

Like rice. I had eaten plenty of rice before going to Africa and was pleased to find it was my village staple. Maize or millet was a more common staple in East Africa, but my village was on a flood plain at the base of a highland massif, perfect for growing rice during the floods of the long rains. Mpunga was the Swahili word for rice, and it was a big word in Kidodi village. Naturally, as the new agriculture teacher, the first the school had had in years, I was determined to have a good rice crop. The parents complained that they sent their kids to school so they would not have to farm. Yet there I was.

The school did have plenty of land available for planting out behind the school building, and it probably once had a fine garden, but nature had reclaimed it. In Africa, nature does not fool around: I couldn’t see very deep into the field, which was overgrown with elephant grass. At least, I guess that’s what it was. Anyway, an elephant could have hidden in it, so tall were the blades.

Using hoes and machetes we cleared a place for a nursery where we could start growing our rice. My Peace Corps sheet on rice said to plant it in a nursery and then transplant it. The local method was to plant it straight in the field, so our project would demonstrate a superior yield from a superior method the villagers could adopt.

When it was time to transplant the rice from the nursery, I led my kids out to the field. The nursery had come along fine, although it seemed to have a lot of fresh grass growing alongside the rice. I told the students the plan. Carefully remove the individual rice plants from the soil and carry them over to the larger field for replanting. Sure, said the kids, and began carefully removing the grass.

Nope, nope, I said. They stopped and looked at me.

Take the rice shoots, I said, and plant them over there.

At once they began again to take the grass. We went through the routine one more time before the penny dropped in my slow-moving brain. The grass was the rice. What I thought was rice were weeds. So, O.K., they know what rice looks like and I don’t.

After a certain amount of bending and getting dizzy, we moved the rice from the nursery to the field, just in time to take advantage of the great rains. More water came down from the highland slopes, bringing fertile soil with it and sitting on the ground. All the villagers were looking forward to harvesting a year’s worth of eating, and seeds for the next year’s planting besides.

When the rains stopped and the water began to recede, the people of my village began an action not mentioned on the mimeo sheets. They built makeshift platforms that rose above the rice and sent their children out to sit on them. When birds came into the fields, the kids on the platforms would sling stones at them to chase the winged grazers away. I did not discuss it with the head teacher, but probably he would have been agreeable to setting up a similar system at the school. I wasn’t agreeable. The students had come to learn, not to miss class while they acted as living scarecrows. We would lose some of the rice that way, but that was the price.

It turns out, however, that birds are not partial grazers. By the time the water was down and others were in their fields harvesting rice, our rice was gone. Did the transplanting system lead to better yield per acre? Only the birds knew for sure, and they kept mum.

One day a year later I noticed that I could see clear across the whole school grounds. The school’s field of tall grass had been cleared, worked, and planted. And not with rice nor with radishes. We now grew things schoolchildren could grow and people would eat, foods like okra and eggplant; tomatoes, too, despite the agony of the stooped harvest. I wasn’t any less prone to dizziness, but I couldn’t let the kids work while I voiced enthusiasm.

They called me teacher, but I did an awful lot of learning.

Edmund Blair Bolles served in Tanzania from 1966-68. He is the author of over a dozen books, including A Second Way of Knowing and Einstein Defiant: Genius versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution.