It is harvest time. The paths are once again widening as the ground nuts that were planted all around them are pulled up, the children eagerly cracking open the brown shells to snack on the white flesh (and sometimes just getting impatient and eating the brown shells as well). The white and red sorghum heads wave heavy in the air and most days someone comes to the gate and asks if we want to buy a pumpkin. Cucumbers are sold four for 5 cents in the market and drum beats pulsate through the dusk as people celebrate the new moon of harvest.
And each week at the front of church a pile is made of produce that people have harvested from their gardens.
This past Sunday when the sermon was much shorter and the announcements longer than usual I gradually realised something different must be going on. (The problem with only understanding maybe fifty percent of what is being said is that there is a tendency to be a bit slow on the uptake.) After church everyone filed out like usual, and then they went to one of the houses on the compound and started bringing out vegetables and placing them in a row beside the church.
As I looked, I realised they had gathered together every item of food that is grown here. There was a red bouquet of sorghum heads, the main stable which is ground into flour and then cooked in a variety of ways, along with some yellow heads of maize and some millet. The millet is mainly grown to be a hedge around gardens but some people do harvest whatever the birds have not already eaten. There were the vegetables: tomatoes, eggplants, cucumber, okra, the marrow like umyong, red beans and pumpkin. Other than the cucumber which they often eat like an apple or cut up in pieces and serve with some salt, everything else they cook. That we make salad is not quite normal. There were the cash crops of ground nuts and sesame, which I am very grateful for as they are my main form of snacks and they are a key way for people to get some cash. For sweetness there was a long stick of sugarcane and a bundle of the red kerikede hibiscus flowers that is used to make tea and the only fruit that is grown here, watermelon. The watermelon they had probably weighed more the one-year olds who were making faces at me from the safety of their mother’s arms.
Once all the produce was in a row suitable enough to placate the grandmothers who hovered and the church leaders, a person was assigned to each one. Standing in a line they first held up their item of food and waved it around while they sang. And then the pastor took the items one by one, sang a refrain that included the name of the item, and then handed it back. The children squealed as water and then sand was thrown into the air, some flicking onto their skin.
And then it was done. Food offered up with thankfulness, blessing sought. Time to enjoy a feast.
We sat down in groups, from the young children to the elders of the church. A large silver tray was placed in the middle of each group containing a plate of pumpkin sauce and one of beans with kisra (a thin wrap-like stable made from fermented sorghum) nestled around it. Breaking off pieces of kisra we dipped them into the sauce with our right hands and ate. Sharing the fellowship of the offering together.
The harvest service was also combined with remembrance of Martin Luther and the start of the Reformation in a German town some 500 years ago. It seemed rather surreal sitting in our grass and tarp roofed church listening to this story. Ten minutes earlier the church had been sweating and pulsating with song and the high-pitched undulating calls of the women, as the congregation, even the grandmothers, danced, hiking their toobs back into place as they bobbed up and down to the rhythm pounded out on the stretched-skin drums, with their movements directed by marching whistles and augmented by tin-oil-containers-turned-shakers. And then they sat and listened to the story of some white man in a country they have never seen and possibly never heard of, who wrote something in a language that they do not know, who argued with staid men in fancy cloaks who worshipped in grand cathedrals. And I do not think he had drums in his church service.
And yet, though these worlds are so far removed from each other, it was through the convictions and actions of this man and others like him, that the women now sitting next to me swathed in their colourful toobs and feeding their babies are able to listen to the Word, read in Arabic, English and Otoro (one of their tribal languages). They hear about a nation, maybe even older than theirs, that was told to offer to YHWH the firstborn and the firstfruits. And they dance with joy because they know that even if the harvest is not as plentiful as they want, even if the war continues and they have to stay in this refugee settlement, even if some nights their bellies go hungry, the firstborn has been offered up and accepted for them and they have been invited to the one feast that really counts.
On that day we will join the firstborn at the feasting table and hands that are black and white and scarred through the middle will dip into the plate together.
The harvest will truly have come.
(And there will be no germs.)
Life Down the Rutted Red Road 