A Monkey Trap

Lohutok, Sudan

The plane left this morning.  After that, I walked up the valley to our west.  I walked for a ways up the dry, sandy stream bed.  As the stream got rockier, there was water babbling through it.  Parts of the stream were quite pretty with boulders and rocks, pools of clear water, small waterfalls, tiny rapids and grass and trees overhanging the bank.  After about forty-five minutes of walking, I came to the mountain gardens near the head of the valley.  The place seemed drier and sandier than Ahaba.  There was quite a bit of ometi (bullrush millet) mixed in with the osingo (sorghum).  I walked up to a small hut built up in one of the lower fields and said "mong" (a Lotuko greeting) to the young girls who were there.  I always get amusing reactions when I do that.  They were cooking some angiria (sorghum porridge).  I climbed up a rock for quite a ways.  People in some of the fields below me were playing flutes, pounding a drum and singing.

I saw a monkey trap made from a rock, sticks, bark string and a bit of sorghum used as bait.  The following sketch of the trap is my best attempt, but is not quite accurate.  I am not a very good artist.  If the monkey pulls the sorghum, the sticks propping up the rock fall allowing the rock to tumble and pin the monkey's arm.

I saw a young man and woman on a rock in the shade near a sorghum field.  They were talking and smiling.  It was the closest thing I have seen to romance so far.  The man was eating some holé  (or ahulé?) and gave me some to try.  It was a clearly a cucumber, but much shorter and chunkier than the ones we have in the U.S.A.

This afternoon, Martha, Marcia, Brian and I walked over to Lohofan.  This is the place to our east which reminds me of Buttermilk Falls in Ithaca, New York.  (There is photo of this area  at my blog entry dated June 27, 1980.)  I should mention that Brian Arensen is Lanny's younger brother.  He is  here on a short visit.

Interviewing Josiah About Lotuko Agriculture

Lohutok, Sudan
 
It rained most of the morning and some of the afternoon.  I read the rest of the CIMMYT publication about rapid surveys for planning agricultural innovation or research.  It motivated me to start structuring what I am doing.  I need to get crackin' on a thesis outline revision and some tentative ideas for a formal survey.
 
I talked to Josiah this afternoon.  Tomorrow they are going to have a meeting after church to form a cooperative for buying grain.  The grain can be purchased from Equatoria Trading Commission which is headquartered in Juba.  The grain can be purchased in Juba for 15 Sudanese pounds or in Torit for 22 pounds.  That compares with the merchants' price of 30 or 36 pounds.
 
Josiah told me that there is no person in authority who allocates the gardens.  Apparently, for the mountain gardens, a group of people decide they will make gardens in a certain place.  If someone wants to go along with them, he can.  They then, as a group, decide the boundaries of each person's garden.  Josiah says that there is plenty of land.  I guess that is why there can be such an informal arrangement for deciding who gets what and how much land.
 
According to Josiah, there is shifting cultivation out on the plains as well as the mountains.  That makes sense.  In the valley, cultivation is continuous.  On the mountains, fields can be farmed for 2 to 4 years with a 10 year fallow.  On the plains, fields can be cultivated for 3 to 6 years with a 15 or maybe 20 year fallow.  Weeds are the problem which necessitates rotating to fallow on the plains.  Weeds are not so big a problem on the mountains.  This I have observed.  I wonder why the cultivation period and the fallow period both are shorter on the mountains?  Faster nutrient cycling?  More rain?
 
There are 7 clans in Lohutok by Josiah's count.  A given clan does not live in a particular village.  Neither do village or clan divisions determine who goes together to clear a garden such as on the mountain.  One can only marry someone from a different clan.
 
Cattle, goats, sheep and chickens are owned individually.  Some people apparently have quite a few cattle and goats while others have few or none.  During the civil war, the Arabs and Taposa took or killed the animals.  Since then, the herds had to be built up from nothing.  When someone accumulated enough money he could perhaps buy a goat.  That is how the recovery began.
 
I get the impression that there are gender roles but that they are not strictly adhered to.  Hoeing the gardens tends to be done by men but women also hoe.  The women tend to be the ones who gather the weeds into piles if my observations are representative.  When planting is done with communal labor, it is the owner and his best friend and their wives who gather the weeds into bunches according to Josiah.  It is very important to take up all the weeds so they do not regerminate or prevent the crop from starting by smothering it.  (Apparently this is not true in some areas of the Imatong mountains.)  Weeding may also be done collectively.  For collective labor the owner of the garden must provide food and beer.  Weeding tends to be done by women but I have seen many men do the weeding also.
 
During school hours, children who do not go to school guard crops from monkeys and birds.  The children who go to school are supposed to relieve them by guarding the crops after school hours.  If all children went to school, I do not know how this job would get done.  It is not uncommon for a family with 4 children to put 2 in school and keep 2 at home to work.  Compulsory eduction and crop protection could be very conflicting goals.
 
Josiah said that perhaps three-fourths of the farmers have mountain gardens.
 
Josiah mentioned rural-urban migration as a contributing factor in the food shortage.  The drought was the main factor.  The rains did not fall much from July to October.
 
School vacation is from December to April which is the hot dry season.
 
Josiah said it could be difficult to get many people into a cooperative because they are not educated.  They might think the government should give them grain or that the government was taking their money to use for other projects.  This could hold a lesson about the feasibility of a credit program or herbicide and fertilizer programs.  The people might have difficulty understanding and implementing them.

Welding and Learning About Gender Roles in Farming

Lohutok, Sudan

I wrote to Pastor John and Ruth Wilkens of Brantford Covenant Church in Kansas.  I asked them to show their letter to Delbert and Pearl Anderson.  I also wrote to Dave Ettestadt, a grad student in Physics at Cornell.

Last night, my stomach was rather uneasy and I had some diarrhea.  It was minor and seems to be gone now.  Samuel is still fighting something he came down with yesterday.  It may be malaria.  Malaria used to be a frightening word.  With modern medicine, it is not much different than the flu (except that it can recur).

I saw a guy walk past this morning with an automatic rifle.  Interesting!  A hold-over from the latest civil war I suppose.  Or perhaps it came out of Uganda.

I helped Samuel do some welding this afternoon.  It was a bit frustrating as the welder quit working part way through.  Its habit is to quit when it gets warmed up.

A guy named Ernes (spelling?) stopped to see what we were doing.  He said he was finished planting today.  He said weeding will start next week.  He said the women do the weeding.  "Men cannot weed", he said.  I tried to ask what the men do.  I think I understood him to say that men sit around and / or they will dig or plant cassava.  This opens up a whole new set of questions about who does what and will complicate any labor use studies.  Oh well, farming systems in less developed countries are supposed to be complicated.  I also see I have not gotten complete answers about what crops are grown.  I wonder if cassava is used as a famine reserve crop?