Cassava Work

Cassava is the staple in our village.  Typically it is either made into cassava bread or dried out to make farine.  Either way, cassava work is a big process and something I want to learn.  The problem is that no one will let me help.  Thankfully other volunteers have expressed their difficulty in getting people in their village to accept them enough to help as well.  It’s as though they think we are too weak.  The fact that I’ve hiked to other villages doesn’t seem to make me any “stronger”.

I did, finally, get Auntie Norma to let me help with the farine work.  Granted, she only had me come to help peel and grate, but it’s a start.  They had already grated the first batch the day before and had it sitting to start to rot.  Half the farine is allowed to start rotting and then is mixed with the half that has not.

Most people have a separate cassava house outside of their own where they do all the work.  When I entered Auntie Norma’s cassava house, several of her children and her daughter-in-law were already peeling away.   I jumped in but definitely was not anywhere close to efficient.  Her oldest daughter, sitting to my right, was hacking away at cassava root after cassava root.  I just sat there watching for awhile, trying to get the hang of it.  I finally asked Auntie when the children start helping with the cassava work.  She said when they are five years-old.  I asked her if I was at least as good as a six year-old.  She laughed.

Here we are grating cassava.  The matapis are hanging on the wall behind me. 
In the foreground is the already peeled cassava waiting to be grated.

Their cassava house fits just the essentials needed for the work: a fireside oven, an industrial size kahari set on rocks (think of a witch’s brewing vat), matapis (a long cylindrical basket to drain the cassava – like an enormous Chinese finger trap), and her grater.  Usually the women grate by hand which takes days, but Uncle Eddie built a grater powered by pedaling a bicycle.  It saves a ton of time as usually the grater is nothing more than a punctured and rolled out milk tin nailed down to a wooden board.

To the left of me on the floor are the unpeeled pieces of cassava. 
The mess at our feet is all the peelings. 
The kahari is the large pot in the back left of the picture.

We peeled all of the cassava with nothing more than kitchen knives, then washed them in water and set them up for grating.  Their nine year-old son jumped on the bike first, his arms hanging onto a rope thrown over a wooden beam above him for balance, as Auntie Norma pushed the smaller pieces through the grater.  He only lasted five minutes before one of his older brothers jumped on.  Auntie started with the smallest pieces, some no bigger than a baby tomato, and used the larger pieces to push them through.  She grated for over an hour before I left for dinner and only had half done.

You can kind of see the grating machine in the back of the picture. 
The bicycle is hooked up to a milk tin punctured with holes to grate as it turns.  Genious.

One day I’ll go through the whole process, start to finish, and proudly blog about that as well.