First Interactions: Into the Field

Local enumerator (right) with farmer (left) 

Books, YouTube videos, stories from professors: These all help shed light on the realities of poor  smallholder farmers in various places around the world. Today was my first experience visiting a village and interacting with groundnut farmers here in the district of Nampula, Mozambique. Our team arrived to the village and met under a large mango tree in the center of the community to talk with the chef and another elder about our intentions. It was a beautiful, cool day with children, goats, chickens, and other residents mingling around us as the team conducted their first interviews. The local and American PMIL collaborators mainly talked about the project and visited some of the individual team members as they were completing their interviews (a length of almost two hours per survey).

Children incredibly excited to see their own pictures

Multifaceted Communication

I sat with one pair for a while (pictured above) just listening. As the enumerator, Monea, asked her about her farm land, her crops, and production practices, the farmer used a mixture of Makuwa (the local language) and Portuguese. She spoke carefully, using twigs and tuffs of grass beside her to share her point. To be honest, I had no idea of the details the woman was trying to explain given the mixture of languages and her different accent, so my understanding of certain things often came from what Monea marked on the survey or explained to me in Portuguese or a bit of English. It made me think a lot about the way we communicate-- essentially the art of passing thoughts or ideas to one person to another. There's verbal communication, there's so much more: from demonstrating peanut drying structures with small twigs, to sitting on the ground with someone (to help show equality and respect), to wrapping a skirt around your pants before you speak with a farmer (to be respectful). This small actions send important messages.

The village 

The Face of Food Insecurity 

One of the team members spoke about the situation of the woman farmer they interviewed, a widow and head of a five person household. The farmer spoke of her 2 hectare plot (machamba) that she cares for all by herself, without mechanization, to receive a crop to sustain the subsistence-farming household. A few weeks ago, her adult daughter fell ill and moved back to live with the family. Her illness caused her to spend many weeks in the hospital. To cover costs, they were forced to sell nearly all the family's harvest-- a food supply that normally sustains them through the winter months. When asked how they were going to have food to eat, she answered simply, "I don't know." This story gives a small piece of insight into the difficult realities that many of these farmers face.