World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 - (Page 25)

and sometimes impossible, people must expend an extraordinary amount of energy simply to survive. It is best to eat together, in the sunlight Daily life in Mme. Mederbeh’s village, an amiable combination of individual responsibilities and group efforts, has, in recent years, become steadily more taxing and less productive. Although free from the effects of dams or other water diversions, Dourum and the surrounding areas suffer severely from drought. While the residents of these remote areas are generally not aware of global climate change, they are acutely aware of the changes in their own area and describe their increasingly laborious efforts to draw a living from the land. The rainy season, when much of the growing and harvesting takes place, was always a time of hard work. But these days, with less rain and fewer crops, Mme. Mederbeh and other village residents work almost constantly to make the most of it. Mme. Mederbeh, whose husband died 17 years ago, has a tougher day than many. Since her husband died, she says, she has two jobs: men’s work and women’s work (roughly divided in her culture into field responsibilities for the men and home responsibilities for women, though most women also do some work in the fields). She rises early, at 4 or 5 a.m., to take care of her household tasks: fetching water from the well more than a mile away, sweeping the house, washing the dishes and collecting sticks from the surrounding countryside to burn in her open-pit fireplace. “If I have eaten the night before, I eat the leftovers,” she says. “Otherwise, I don’t eat.” After taking care of her house, she heads into the fields. Mme. Mederbeh has four plots of land, one that she rents and three that her husband bought years ago. During yet come to the Chad River Basin, resource scarcity makes it vulnerable. During Heifer’s visit, rebel activity broke out in Ndjamena, Chad, just over the Cameroonian border, and northern Cameroon was flooded with refugees escaping the violence. Daily life is already changing as violence encroaches. Life here always required a certain amount of resourcefulness and flexibility, but the land was rarely uninhabitable, and in the small villages scattered throughout the periphery of the region, people were generally able to secure a living, albeit an extremely modest one. Today, as ordinary activities become difficult www.heifer.org the rainy season she spends most of her daylight hours in the fields, bent over at the waist, tilling, planting and weeding with a short-handled hoe. During the longest days, she may not return home until 5 in the evening. Mme. Mederbeh’s workload is made somewhat lighter by help from her husband’s second wife, who still lives in the compound with Mme. Mederbeh. (Islam is the predominant religion here, and polygamy is not uncommon.) But, as she says, “A man is stronger than a woman,” and the two of them cannot till as much land as she and her husband did together. If the work is more than she and her husband’s wife can handle, and she has the money, she can rent a donkey for the equivalent of about $10, though she says the recent poor yields have not made this necessary. If her workload will allow it, she comes home in the early afternoon and prepares a meal—the first of the day— for herself and nine others who live near her. Virtually without exception, meals are millet or groundnuts (peanuts), either boiled like a hot cereal or made into a sort of cake. Occasionally, she will buy a small amount of meat for “festive times,” but otherwise the meal hardly varies. The group eats in the small, bright courtyard of Mme. Mederbeh’s compound, between the mud huts she uses for sleeping and cooking and the ones used to store grain and keep livestock in at night. A few small chickens peck in the sand. “It is best to eat together, in the sunlight,” she says. When the crops are ready, her neighbors help with the harvest, and in return Mme. Mederbeh pays them in a drink that serves as a form of local currency, a fermented brew called bilibili. It is made from millet flour, which the women grind vigorously by hand on a flat stone, usually while singing a high-pitched tune “to make the job nicer,” as September/October 2008 | WORLD ARK 25 http://www.heifer.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008

World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 Contents Letters For the Record The Good Life Asked and Answered Digging Up the Past Not a Drop to Drink Facing the Ogres of Progress Mixed Media Heifer Bulletin Heifer Spirit World Ark Market Calendar First Person

World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008

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