Pulling Consho

About a month ago I joined a group of eight women - my sisters, aunties, and neighbors - to go pick consho beans on my counterpart's wife's farm. Concho are a type of fava bean (I think) that grow in pods on tall stalks, picked from the stem when they're dry and turned from green to brown. Served up with lots of spices, rich, red palm oil and fish piled high on top of rice or bread, it's filling, high and protein, and tasty.

Before we leave for the farm in the morning, my counterpart's wife Kulako cooks rice and granat soup for everyone for lunch. On the way to the farm, we fill up a bucket with drinking water from the cool mountain spring on the way up, which Kulako casually totes on her head up the mountain trail. Most of the other women have already begun to work when we arrive at the farm - rows and rows of tall consho stalks sprouting from the slanted hill below the daunting flat rock face of Gborkolo Mountain.

Kulako wraps a lapa around my head to keep leaves and critters out of my hair, hands me a big rubber basin, and sends me on my way up the hill with the other women to "pull consho", so-called for the motion of pulling the beans off the stalks. As I pull the beans off the stalks and drop them into the basin, I listen as the women gossip and joke and sing songs in Mandingo. They show me tricks of the trade like how to pull the flexible stalk down so it bends towards me, allowing me to pick the beans from the top more efficiently. They also repeatedly warn to stay away from the "S" shaped fury things that hang off some of the plants, unless I want my hand to swell up like a balloons and to break out in hives all over my body. I heed their warnings seriously.

The group of women I joined are eight in number. Each woman has their own consho farm, and rather than being solely responsible for the tedious task of harvesting an entire farm, they join forces to help each other with the work load. Whoever's farm they go to on a given day, that person is responsible for providing rice and water for the other women. Every day, they take turns rotating to a new woman's farm, repeating the rotation for 8-10 weeks until all the beans are picked. Some of the beans they sell, but most they store in their homes to feed their families, sometimes lasting until the next year’s harvest.

Several hours and several buckets of consho later, we call it a day and head back down the hill. Toting the legumes of our labor on our heads, we pick green beans as we walk through other community members’ farms. The cool, crunchy, sweet veggie is perfectly gratifying after hours in the sun. As we head towards our homes, I chat with my next door neighbor about how she likes farming – she doesn’t, not really anyway. She tells me how her and the other women I was with that day “suffer”, having to be out in the sun doing physical labor every day in order to provide for their families. I don't blame her for feeling this way; it's a lot of hard work for a little income. Not being able to read or write, she shrugs her shoulders as if to say “but what can we do?”

When we reach back down, my neighbor helps me spread the beans out on the drying floor to dry them in the sun. After a few hours in the sun, we "knock" the beans - literally knocking the dried pods with a big stick to force the beans out of the pods. Then it’s separating, shifting, and cleaning. And at the end, I have a heaping bowl of dried consho beans and a huge appreciation for the strong women I spent the day with.