There is a tree just inside the church compound that reminds me of the Tree of Life. It was full of beautiful yellow and orange fruit today, ripening in the warm sun. This fruit is called Carambola or Star fruit. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carambola This fruit comes from Asia and it is delicious. To me it tastes a lot like a loquat.
So tasty! The children love to pick and eat these!
There is another fruit tree in the compound bearing fruit now. This one is called Corossol or Soursop. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soursop They told me this fruit can be used to help treat cancer here.
Eveque (Bishop) Mel and I had an hour or more to wait during the leadership meeting, so we left the compound and went for a wander through the nearby farms and into the village.
Directly across the road from the meeting place is this small cocoa grove. Many of the cocoa pods have been harvested since my last visit here several weeks ago. The cocoa pods hang on the trunks low to the ground. Here’s how it looked today:
This is the road the church is on. We headed east to see where it led us. This area is full of farming and good soil with plenty of water. It rains a lot here and it’s very humid. To step outside is to be instantly wet. The sun is hot. Today it was in the mid 90s, and my weather app said “feels like 100.” Humidity was in the high 70s.
These are large banana trees–you can see the stocks of a large variety of banana growing towards the top. There are many varieties of bananas here–from small finger-sized to these large ones. There are also plantain growing here, the large cooking bananas.
Here is a cassava patch. Cassava is a root crop you will see later in this post.
This young man happened by with his load. When we asked what he was carrying, he showed us.
It was a sack of wood clippings. He was going to spread them around his banana trees.
We passed by a small grove of rubber trees where the sap was being harvested in these small buckets.
You can see the cuts made in the tree bark and the sticky sap dripping down to the buckets:
Next we came to a beautiful palm grove. It was surrounded by a wall and when we entered the grove, we felt like we’d walked into a garden of Eden.
It was peaceful, quiet and a bit cooler in the shade of these huge palms. Palm fruit is grown throughout western Africa. The bright red fruit grows in bunches at the tops of the palm trees and these bunches are harvested. We only saw a couple of bunches on the ground–the harvest here is over. Palm fruit is used to make palm oil and palm wine. The women like the oil, the men like the wine! And I? Well, I like a path through a peaceful palm grove.
Here’s an old bunch that’s falling apart:
The palm trunks were decorated with beautiful ferns.
These tropical plants are glorious!
Here’s another rather ragged-looking bunch and what a good bunch looks like:
Oil palm fruit bunches harvested. Resting on the ground
Next we passed by a small chicken farm.
We met a woman there who was shelling something that looked like green beans. She called it Pinaira. She said the part inside is dried then put on sick plants.
Next we met this young man on his way to his farm with his machete. Machetes are the go-to tool here. They are used for cutting grass, trimming, harvesting, and just about everything.
Then we turned up this path to go into the village. This looks like the village garbage dump. Anything of use has been taken from here and used in some way. Plastics are a problem throughout Africa. Plastic does not go away.
We met this cute gal working in her kitchen. She was making gumbo (okra) soup.
Plastics are also a good thing here. These containers hold water and store food.
Here is the bathroom in her compound:
There were coconut palms overhead.
Village life:
This was an interesting coconut palm by the next compound. These, I’m told, are Ghanaian coconuts. The palms are short and easy to harvest. No climbing needed.
In the next post, I’ll show you what we found in the neighbor’s compound.
Our Cote d’Ivoire Abidjan East and Bamako, Mali Mission 