I say tomato, you say tamaate

A while back, I headed out with my adopted family here to help them harvest their tomato crops. Given the poor quality of the soil here in Ndioum, all of the fields are located on the other side of the river (which is crossed in a rickety ferry), followed by a 30 minute horse cart ride to where the soil is richer/where an irrigation system has been installed connected to another river. Since most of the tomatoes harvested in these go to a nearby factory and get turned into tomato paste, this factory sets "collection" days, when it will send it's huge trucks across on the ferry to pick up people's crops. This means that anyone and everyone is out in their fields on these days, putting together as many crates as possible. Any tomatoes that don't make the factory's cut (they prefer ripe to over-ripe) are then sold at the market and on the side of the road, where 6 tomatoes (the most I can eat in one sitting) go for about 13 cents. I love tomato season.

THat day we were all up at the crack of dawn (very literally - it was still dark out when I headed over to their house), and after packing up the horse cart and picking up some of the neighbours, we were off to catch the ferry. Ndioum's ferry is one of the few mechanical ones in service, so it's extremely expensive to operate. This means that they have had to resort to a (relatively) fixed schedule, which results in a crazy gridlock of horses and donkey carts, intermixed with over enthusiastic children and tired adults.

Waiting for the ferry to load


Didn't quite fit on the first one...



Not gonna lie, it was a little cramped...

Once we got to the other side, it was off to the fields for us! After the 30 horse cart, we hopped of and headed into the fields. It seems like the entire town shares the irrigation system, so everyone's crops are connected in these giant fields. You have to balance along thin strips of sand/dirt until you make your way to your own little section of the field. I was definitely not very graceful at this! I should also note that the strict (for my region at least) "no showing your knees" policy for women does not apply when you're harvesting - it was quite entertaining to see all of my friends take of their pagnes (long skirts) to reveal soccer/basketball shorts!

Time to get cracking!

The trick to tomato harvesting is to not fall over into the mud (I wasn't so good at this part), and more importantly to try to gentley twist off all of the ripe (and even over-ripe) tomatoes. Since there were so many plants, we had to make sure that we didn't miss any tomatoes, so there were a lot of impressive acrobatic moves that took place as we twisted around the plants. Once your bucket was full, you then lugged it down to the clearing at the edge of the field, dumped it out on some old rice sacks, and then headed back to do it all over again.

Cartons being filled up in the fields

About 4 hours later, when we had harvested all of the tomatoes, it was time to sort them. As I said before, the factories prefer the ripe/over ripe ones, so we had to separate them out into the big black crates. The slightly less ripe ones went into the plastic buckets to sell and to eat at home. It was quite the time consuming process, and by the end of it we were filthy, exhausted, and extremely pleased with ourselves for getting it done so quickly (we were one of the first families to be finished - rather impressive I thought!). We then lugged the big crates to the side of the road where they would be picked up by the trucks later on in the day, loaded up the remaining tomatoes, and headed back to the ferry. After an hour's wait (the ferry was having some mechanical difficulties) it was back to the house, where we got to enjoy the fruits (pun-intended) of our labour. So delicious!

Sorting out the tomatoes