Pastor Kadie's Farm, Part II

I took a bite, and pulled back without removing any fruit. It was
gross. Oily and pretty much tasteless. A couple drops of oil fell on
to my fingers, reminding me of the way I get oil on my hands when I
pick out fishbones from my beef at Sunshine, the restaurant. It looked
the same. Allan and Katie were on their second fruits, and Amhidu and
Sahr Bindi were wolfing them down in their speed-eating way. With a
deep breath, I ripped off a chunk. To be generous, let's say I chewed
it for ten seconds before discreetly removing it and dropping it on
the ground. There was a mess of yellow fibers strung across the fruit
where I had bitten off the skin. The kernel in the middle was visible.
"I can show you how we process the oil too." Pastor Kadie's smile
revealed that his lower teeth were curved like a roller coaster.
After a moment, we set off again. My mind was moving much slower,
calmed by the green foliage and wind and palm trees. It was also
calmed by the palm oil taste; this was a real idea. Maybe we couldn't
wreck it by making the wrong decision. The simmering mess of facts and
processes in my mind was receding, slowly. The accompanying adrenaline
was also going.
The path twisted a bit and went up and down a couple of bumps.
Suddenly we emerged into an encampment of some kind. There was a
triangular grass roof held up on thick sticks, and five or six
children. Just beyond the grass hut there was a silver lidded pot
spewing steam above hot coals, and a set of colorful plastic bowls.
Behind that there was a square pit, maybe three feet deep and six feet
by six feet in area. The floor of the pit seemed to be a mix of
flagstone and mud. At the far edge of the pit there was a hole that
drained out into a ditch; the ditch drained into a marsh. We were down
at the bottom of the valley, and I couldn't see the big tree anymore.
The grove of big trees, however, was plainly visible.
"So here," he gestured to the pit, "we process the oil. You have to
plug the hole."
"With this one. Plug with this one." Eddie had clambered around to the
other side of the pit and was touching a big stone that was roughly
the size of the hole.
We gathered round. Pastor Kadie spoke. "First, we boil them. Then we
put them in the pit and we step," There was some excited Krio, then
laughter. Somebody pointed to the boots. "Yes, with these ones."
Pastor Kadie pointed to them. "Then we add water. And the oil, it
floats, so we jus skim it." The last was said with a conspiratorial
smile. The three 'white' people oohed and aahed in amazement.
"And there is the nuts." Eddie pointed excitedly to a giant pile of
nuts beside the pit. He had been explaining to me earlier that even
though Tenera produced 30% more oil, Dura was also good because its
nuts were bigger and thus it produced more nut oil. Pastor Kadie
nodded towards the nuts.
"Yes, you can also crush these ones and get oil. But," he shrugged,
"we don't have time, so we just leave them. You know they want to make
fuel from these ones."
"Oh really?" Allan has a great friendly prompt.
"Yes, people came by, and talked of making fuel from these ones. It's,
it's like a vegetable oil. It's the one you had." He turned to me. I'm
not sure how he knew, but yes, in the town I had been shown the
difference between palm kernel oil and palm oil. The former is brown,
the latter red or yellow. Both are used in cooking, but the palm oil
is more expensive.
Pastor Kadie handed Katie a nut."Thanks." She looked at it, and Eddie
explained to her what was going on. A little girl appeared, cracking a
nut with a rock. She handed it to Katie.
"You eat this one." Amhidu encouraged her. Katie didn't need
encouragement. She ate some.
"Tastes like coconut!" I tried some. It tasted like wood.
"Yeah," I agreed. My tastebuds aren't great.
Then a yellow squash-like fruit appeared in front of me. "Cocoa." I overheard.
"Wait – this is cocoa? Chocolate."
"Yes." Amhidu said. It had a couple of holes in it.
"You dry the one inside, and then you eat it." Sahr Bindi explained.
"Okay,"
"Here," Eddie already had Allan's attention back near the grass hut.
he had some dried cocoa. It was in a small nut, maybe the size of my
fingernail. I tried some and handed it to Allan. It tasted bitter,
vaguely intoxicating, and similar to dark chocolate.
Then we were back at the edge of the pit. Allan took in a deep breath
and prepared to ask a question.
"Pastor Kadie, why didn't they cut down those trees?"
"What?"
"The trees. They're very big, and they're gone all over Sierra Leone.
Why did they spare those trees?"
"Oh, the forestry."
"Yes, the forestry. Why not take those trees too?" Pastor Kadie chuckled.
"Well, the thing is, we have so many. They can't take all them. We
just have so many. But it is nice to still have some."
"They're beautiful big trees. It's really something to think that the
country used to be covered in them."
Eddie reappeared, two palm fruits in hand. One was big and round, the
other smaller and more square. The round one had a strong yellow color
at the base, while the square one was more evenly red. "This one," he
shook his right hand a bit, "is macocaia. You see how there is yellow
there, that means it has yellow oil. This one is tenera," he shook his
left hand a bit, "and it will have a nice red oil, you see, from the
color, the red here."
"The macocaia is these ones," Pastor Kadie motioned to a pile of palm
fruits at the edge of the dirt clearing. They were noticeably bigger.
"They have very big fruits, very big."
"The nut inside, it's very large." Eddie added.
"But the oil, is not so much as the other ones."
Okay, so macocaia gives yellow oil, and tenera gives red oil? And the
difference in yields – that matches up with what we know about tenera
and dura. But does tenera always give red oil, and macocaia always
give yellow oil?
Pastor Kadie's family had faded into the background to watch. A few
times I tried to say hello, but they remained politely impassive.
Sometimes they were pouring water, or washing something, and one girl
cracked some nuts for Katie, but other than that they remained at the
edge of the clearing and watched.
"So Pastor Kadie, do you process the different oils separately or mix
them all together?" Allan asked a question.
"No, mix them all together." Pastor Kadie gave a brief dismissive shrug.
"And the color is red?"
Pastor Kadie nodded. "It's red, dark red. But we have some variety,
the local palm," he gestured back behind him to a medium sized palm,
"this one is not so good, I don't mix it in. It gives a thicker oil, a
different oil, it is not so red."
Dura? Was that old Dura? Supposedly Dura was native to West Africa,
and there was also an improved variety of Dura.
"And Pastor Kadie, why do you plant all four varieties?" Allan asked
another question.
"So I can harvest all the time, all year."
"Oh, so it gives fruit throughout the year."
"Yes."
I briefly conferred with Katie and Allan. "Should I try one last time
to figure out what masangke is?"
"Yeah, it's worth a try." So I turned to Pastor Kadie.
"Pastor Kadie," he looked at me through his small, round glasses,
"where does the masangke oil come from?"
"Oh, masangke. Well, I tell you where the name comes from. There is a
village, a region, somewhere called Masangke. And they were the first
to have the masangke tree, the first to use them, and so the local
people they just call them masangke."
"So masangke is a type of tree?"
"No, masangke is a name for the five varieties that produce the two oils."
I thought for a moment, then turned to Katie. Pastor Kadie moved away.
"So the masangke is..."
"It's a blanket name for all the varieties of tree that make the oil, I think."
"But no, that doesn't make sense. He said it was the five varieties...
of oil? No, that doesn't make sense either," I was confused. Masangke
was the varieties of tree? It turns that is indeed the case – all the
improved varieties of palm are known as masangke. Katie was right.
"This is the palm oil," Pastor Kadie was back, with a yellow plastic
container. It was almost completely empty, but he poured out a bit
onto the lid. The oil was opaque and orange-red, with sparkling
suspended particles. It wasn't very viscous.
"Pastor Kadie," Allan wore his questioning look again, "I have a question."
"Yes?"
"Who lived here 100 years ago?"
"Ha! Well, I don't know. They say the Limbe, the Limbe at the coast,
told the Kono to come here and wait, and so Kono, it means wait. Wait
for what, I don't know!"
Soon after we set out. We weren't sure about the plan, so we thanked
Pastor Kadie profusely before we all began to walk out together. I
turned to Allan. "I really love it here. I would love to spend a day
here."
"Yeah, there's something very special going on in this place."
Not ten steps out of the clearing we stopped. "This is cocoa tree."
Pastor Kadie motioned.
"Oh! Wow, a cocoa tree..."
The cocoas were dangling from the branches like Christmas tree
ornaments. On the tree they were a frosty green color.
"Cocoa tastes like sweetsap." Katie was comparing cocoa to another
alien fruit we'd tried. She thinks it's also called cheremoya. If
someone smashed a cheremoya on my doorstep I would think that aliens
were invading. But the insides of the fruits look similar – white,
with a translucent juice.
"Pastor Kadie, does it like sun, or shade?" Allan's baseball cap was
very similar to Pastor Kadie's.
"Well, it likes both. Too much sun, and the breeze blows the fruits
down, but too cold, and he gets black pore disease."
Katie missed what he said, so I explained it back to her. Then she
said, "So, are we going to ask him the rest of our questions?"
"What questions?" I meant which questions.
"The ones we were planning to ask!"
"Oh, well, like which ones? I feel like a lot of my questions have
been answered."
"Well, like what exactly is the yellow oil?"
"Oh... I guess I don't know that."
We followed the pastor up the hill, out a different path than we
entered. When we reached the top, we were on the road again, a ways
above the vehicle.
'Now we will talk. We will arrange the trees." Amhidu told Allan,
Katie and I. I guess we were giving down payment on the trees without
fully deciding which ones we would buy. Okay...
Sahr Bindi, Eddie, Amhidu and Pastor Kadie conversed rapidly in Krio.
I wasn't listening. I was thinking about the giant tree in the middle
of the valley, currently obscured by brush, and looking at the palm
trees right in front of us. Did they really hold the key to financing
the clinic? Were we really going to turn the fruit into chloroquinine,
via plastic jerry cans and loading docks in Freetown? Local lore holds
that the palm oil is an antiseptic; that it heals wounds. Allan put
some on his cut earlier, and had told us that it stung a bit. I wish I
had asked Pastor Kadie about that.
Someone picked up that they were discussing numbers, so I blinked away
my reverie. "Wait. It was 60 per acre?"
"Yeah," Allan agreed.
"But using hexagons, we get 15% more. So," we get 15% more in the same
area, while keeping the minimum 30 feet between trees.
"So 70?" Close enough. "Okay, 70. And add 20%, for the ones that won't
take when we plant them. So 83 or 84."
"That means we need 840 for 10 acres."
"Right. Amhidu,"
"Yes?"
"Make sure you get 830."
"Okay, I will tell him."
Amhidu turned back and told Pastor Kadie, in Krio. Sahr Bindi took the
increased number of trees to mean that we were now planting over
twelve acres. Eddie seemed confused. Allan, despite his lack of Krio,
picked up on it.
"Maybe we're going to have to explain the hexagons?" I grinned. I
really like the hexagons. After a moment, I added, "I really like this
place."
Katie agreed. And Allan put a supernatural spin on it. "Yeah, let's
just say there's something very good going on over there. And yes, I
do mean weird shit." Alan grinned, his eyes dark in the shade of his
dorky hat brim.
Then Pastor Kadie broke out the price. He must have said it in Krio,
but memory has translated it to English.
"So, the ministry, they sell for 5000. For 4500. At the ministry. But
me, I want to help out my fellow farmer," he clapped Sahr Bindi on the
back, "so I say 3000."
Amhidu translated. "He says 3000 per tree." That's about 92 cents per
tree. I nodded, but no one needed my opinion. Allan nodded, and that
was what counted.
"Wait, Amhidu?" Allan caught Amhidu just as he turned back. Both of
them were well framed against blue sky and green foliage.
"Hmm?"
"Tell him we'll give him 3500. And I'll tell you why." He motioned for
Amhidu to tell Pastor Kadie. Amhidu did. There was laughter, and
controversy.
"Amhidu," Allan was explaining, I guess, "we did that to invest in the
future. This man knows a lot. We need him on the farm advisory board,
and we need his help. Tell him that. Tell him that's why he's getting
3500." Later Allan made clear that this was a one-time deal; that the
price does not go up in the area as a result of this.
Amhidu told Pastor Kadie, and Pastor Kadie seemed overjoyed to help.
"Actually, Amhidu, the first thing we need from him is we need him to
come survey the land before we plant." This was relayed to Pastor
Kadie. I wasn't sure why Allan was talking through Amhidu, because
Pastor Kadie hadn't had trouble with our English thus far.
"That's fine, that's fine, because there is something I must show
you." Pastor Kadie took a pair of long strides out into the dirt road,
machete in hand. He began tracing with his machete. The hairs on the
back of my neck rose. "When you plant the trees, you don't plant them
like this." He had traced out a square pattern, and then circled the
space in the center of the square. "Because this space is wasted.
Instead, you plant them in triangles."
He proceeded to draw the hexagons on the ground, with the tip of his
machete, while he explained them in terms of triangles. I was grinning
maniacally.