Harvest and seed time

Caption: Marcelline harvesting maize

Caption: taking a share of the harvest

Behind the clinic at Kamenge, a poor suburb of Bujumbura where my workshops are taking place, is a piece of land which might eventually be used as a hostel for patients. Meanwhile at the far end by the back gate is a small room with tables and chairs, and a kitchen area with bamboo walls, partly roofed. This is a small restaurant - not just a canteen for the clinic. It raises around $50 a week, which is used for micro-credit loans for HIV+ patients.

The rest of the land is waste ground, I have been told. Last July, US work-campers here asked me for advice by email on how to start cultivation and I advised making compost. Even when Alex arrived in November, nothing was planted. When I looked at the site for the sack garden project on Wednesday we walked into an enclosure of full grown maize underplanted with sweet potatoes. The soil is rich. I thought I must have seriously misunderstood something. Or was there another adjacent barren plot?

The explanation was simple: Marcelline, one of the clinic staff, had decided to make a start.

On Thursday, even as we were planting the seeds in our sack, she fetched a machete, summoned a helper to carry the cobs, and cut the crop. Alex, my American colleague, commented that she had only ever seen harvesting done by machine.

I gave a variant of my usual lesson on rubbish and compost - how new materials such as plastics need treating differently from organic rubbish, how dangerous are the fumes from burning plastic, how we need to learn new habits for new circumstances. How it is up to the people who live here to decide whether to do anything new, while my contribution is to sow some seeds of ideas.

I had thought the clinic might start a demonstration compost heap, using the peelings from the restaurant kitchen of course. As the session broke up I heard that they were going further: they also planned to divide up the land to give small plots to patients with no gardens. (This will be even better than trying to establish sack gardens in odd corners, because gardening will become a social activity.)

At the end of the afternoon session Marcelline was all smiles and excitement. I was taken to the room that serves as a laboratory where testing for HIV and diabetes is carried out. The cobs were divided into heaps all over the floor. There must have been at least a hundred. Alex and I were asked to help ourselves. I took two. Then the workshop participants and staff members were invited to take a pile each.

I brought my two cobs back to the office, where I offered them to Florence, a HROC facilitator I have met briefly in Rwanda. Would she like to take them home and perhaps bring me a portion tomorrow? No, she will cook them here. There is a kitchen but I haven't used the electric hotplate. I strip the cobs while F gets a pan. We break the cobs into portions and set them to boil.

The corn is delicious - not sweet but full of flavour. Florence gathers up the peelings, walks to the door of the first-floor office and returns immediately, empty-handed. Later, when everybody has eaten, I contemplate the husks. I already have banana peel, used peppermint teabags and other assorted rubbish accumulating in the bin in my room and I don't know where to empty it. I take the husks to the door, look over the wall, see a bonfire site - corn peelings, paper, plastic - and drop the husks onto the pile.

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Technical PS: posting images is very dodgy. I'm trying to send a photo or two but keep getting timed out.