This is Jean Claude, agricultural director of the Bethesda farm. More specifically, this is him delighted that his six-week corn already towers over his outstretched arm. He will be the first to tell you that it is God who made it grow. Jean Claude, formerly from the Congo, is an Africa Mercy crew member but he spends most of his time in Benin working on the Bethesda farm. The farm is a joint project with Mercy Ships and a local NGO. Last year when the ship was in Benin they built a lovely facility on the site and now they offer three month courses to farmers teaching them how to farm with Godly principles. Last week I was able to take a break from nursing and go live on the farm for five days. Jean Claude was the only one there with more than ten words of English, but the twenty agricultural students were delighted to have a visitor. They let me play with their hoes and machetes, and always said, "good job, good job," even when I was doing the sort of job that required them to redo it.I loved playing in the dirt and learning something about farming, but more than that I loved being in the country. I loved the little red dirt paths I could run down in the morning, and the air, free from fumes and dust. I loved the delicious African food that arrived by motorbike three times a day. I loved sitting on the porch watching the lightening and the rain, and I loved the farmers, all grown men who giggle and joke about like children.
I also loved how Jean Claude and his students would walk by the corn in the morning and all stop, and he would point at the bees, busy pollenating the corn, and he would say, "God is good. Look at the bees. God is so good." It's true, all of creation is busy declaring the glory of the Lord.
At Bethesda they teach "farming God's way." From what I understood it's basically organic farming, only they call it "God's way" instead of presuming to have invented the idea of growing plants without toxic chemicals. Many farmers here burn their fields and then till them up completely, but that wastes precious nutrients in the soil so they must buy expensive fertilizers. At Bethesda they only till seedling-sized holes and they cover the fields with compost materials -"God's blanket," Jean-Claude calls it -which adds nutrients and also prevents weeds from growing. They make insecticide from onions, garlic and chilies -a huge tub of it that is sprayed over the plants. They sprinkle ashes to reduce the acidity of the soil, and they mix in wheelbarrow loads of chicken manure. They shade their nursery beds with palm branches and use coconut fibers to hold in moisture.
They told me, with Jean Claude translating, that when I go home I can teach others everything I've learned. Once they understood that where I come from there truly are no coconuts growing, and no need to shade things from the sun (this took some convincing) their response was one of awe: "Isn't God amazing that he made so many different places." And later, "isn't He amazing," they would say, shaking their heads and grinning at me, "that he sent you all the way here from so far away." "You have taught us so much," one of them said, "that you work so hard and you sit in the dirt with us." I'm not quite sure what was lost in translation there... they think white people don't like dirt? Regardless, these are good things -to work hard and to sit in the dirt, or simply to be together. To be so pleased for the company that you don't care what you're sitting on or in. And perhaps to even forget there was a job to be done.
I did do some work, but I certainly didn't feel as though I was working hard. Although it didn't seem that anyone was working too hard, at least not for more than a few minutes at a time. And often it was only two or three people working hard while the rest of us watched. They are great team players, these Africans. Not in the sense of efficiency or productivity, but rather in the sense that they will do everything together. Or a cynic might say they do lots of nothing together. Lots of sitting and joking, being busy telling stories. But here it is hard work to just breath sometimes. I could spend a morning doing nothing but standing and sitting outside and still after lunch I would collapse on my bed and sleep for two hours, waking with the same feeling I have after spending too long in a sauna. If I worked too hard here I would die from heat stroke. I'm usually no good at taking naps, but everyday I could have fallen asleep in the dirt... tilled myself an Anna-sized hole and hoped the insecticide man didn't come by and mistake me for a large bug. As it was I came home smelling so bad my roommates wouldn't allow me to unpack my bag in our cabin; I was sent straight to the laundry room.
So I went to the laundry room to wash away the scent of old onions and garlic, of red sand and brown chicken-manure soil, of rainstorms and five days sweating in the sun, the stains of African food eaten with my fingers and juicy mangoes that dribbled down my arms. Me and my things were pungent with the smells of a small farm in Africa. I hadn't noticed until then. But I was not eager to wash them away. Is it strange that I would be jealous of the men I left behind on the farm? I wanted to be back there in my smelly clothes sitting on the porch in the welcome dark, drinking tea with powdered milk and listening to the chatter of the farmers and of the crickets, and maybe standing and walking out under the stars to where the crickets are louder than the men and there is a slight breeze, and I'd sit there in the dirt, with my head back, looking for the big dipper which, I discovered, hangs upside-down in the sky here.
Apostle Paul tells us that we can plant seeds and we can water them, but only God can make them grow. He wasn't speaking of plants, he was speaking of people. All the same -did you see how high that corn is? Tip your head up to see the top of it and tilt your ear to hear the buzzing of the bees way up there. There are so many things I miss about the farm. Being in Africa and surrounded by Africans for one -in particular an Africa that is green and lush and not a polluted port city. I loved the smell of the breeze that came after a rainstorm, and how it felt to hold a ball of dirt that held a living, breathing plant.
Jean Claude said he will bring me some tomatoes when they are ripe. I can't wait to smell them. I will hold them in my hands like precious pearls and say, "Thank you Jean Claude; isn't God good." And he will say, "Yes, Anna, God is so good."
