Cashew Nuts

This time last year, I wrote about cashew fruit. When cashew season came around this time, I decided to experiment with the cashew nut itself, and I recruited a Beninese friend to help me.

Look closely and you can see a cashew nut hanging at the bottom of this cashew fruit.

These are the cashew nuts I collected from the ground beneath the cashew tree.

The cashew nuts are enclosed in a hard shell that must be removed to get at the nut. The shell contains a toxic substance, so it must be removed with a special process. There are actually several means of removing the nut, but in Benin, we use fire.

A can of nuts is perched on three rocks so that we can light a fire underneath.

My friend changed his mind and decided to use corrugated tin instead of the can in order to roast all the nuts at once. Here, he is poking holes in the tin.

My friend has lit the fire under the tin. See that smoke? That is a toxic gas released by the burning shells.

The nuts are on fire! The oil in the shell is highly flammable.

My friend rubs the nuts in dirt to extinguish the fire and make them stop smoldering.

The next step, not pictured here, is to whack open the shells and extract the nut. After having been burned, the shells look like charcoal and are just as brittle. Inside is the nut.

Ultimately, our experiment did not produce many viable nuts. My friend said that he let the nuts burn too long.

As I shared in my cashew blog post last year, it is rare to find cashews for sale here because most cashews are sent to India for processing. I was told that when the Beninese do decide to process the cashew nuts, it is usually just done by teenage boys who enjoy a little pyromania. In particular, it is said that few women attempt to process cashew nuts because of the danger involved.

Pâte Rouge + Eba

Here are some more photos of local foods, one Beninese and one not.

Pâte rouge: this is a delicious variation on the traditional pâte (corn mush) that is the basis of Beninese diets. A bit of the sauce is mixed in with the pâte as it is being prepared, which is what gives it its red color and makes it so tasty. Then it is eaten with the sauce on the left. This sauce has tofu and hard-boiled eggs in it.

Eba: this is a Nigerian dish that is similar to pâte rouge. The major difference is that gari is used in place of corn flour. Gari is a sort of flour produced from cassava, a local tuber.

Snot

Here is a question I am sure you have never considered: how do the Beninese blow their noses?

Well, for starters, they do not use tissues. So the natural assumption would be that they use handkerchiefs, right? Wrong again.

The answer is actually pretty gross when you have grown up with American standards. If the snot is dry, they just pick their nose. It is perfectly normal to do that in public and no one is offended by it. If the snot is wet and mucus-y, they do a "snot rocket." For those of you who do not know this term, that means that you hold down one nostril with your finger and blow hard through the other nostril to send the snot flying out of your nose and onto the ground.

And what if your baby has a stuffy nose? Well, the technique I have seen is that the mom puts her mouth over the baby's nose, sucks the snot into her mouth, and then spits it out onto the ground.

You will be glad to know that on the subject of snot, I have retained my American habits and still use tissues to blow my nose. This is one area where I have decidedly refused to follow Beninese practices!

A Good Friend

A few days ago, a friend was at my house and he noticed a funny smell. He went investigating and discovered its source: a lizard nest in a large empty clay jar next to my house. The problem is, while the lizards easily got in the jar, they never figured out how to get out, and a few dozen had died in there. No wonder it reeked!

We were busy on a project and forgot about the jar, but remembered it the next day. The jar is too heavy for me to move, so my friend very willingly came back over to help. He lowered the jar onto its side, prodded out the few living lizards who were near death, then tilted the jar further to dump the dead lizard bodies onto a piece of plywood. He carried the plywood over to the fence and dumped the dead lizards on the other side.

Someone who offers to help you dispose of a heap of dead lizard bodies, now that is a true friend! I have found many people in my village who are exceptionally kind to me, going well beyond what I could have imagined. The northern Beninese are widely considered to be much kinder than the southern Beninese. In particular, the Bariba have a code of extreme generosity towards guests and foreigners. Not a bad place to be!

A few live lizards and many dead lizards, several of which had already disintegrated into dust

My friend ready to move the jar... it's much heavier than it looks!

Carrying the pile of lizard bodies to be dumped

A Mystery Vegetable

The vegetable below is one that I have encountered periodically on trips to Cotonou. It tastes somewhat like a potato and is fibrous. It is served prepared (cooked and sliced) as shown below and is always accompanied by slices of coconut. Since I had only seen it in this form, I have always wondered what the actual vegetable looks like before preparation and what it is called.

Then, a few weeks ago, I came across this vegetable in village and I finally got to see it in its natural form. The photo below shows the vegetable after it has been pulled out of the ground and boiled, but before it has been peeled and sliced.

Now that I have seen the vegetable in its natural form, that just leaves the question of its name. Do any of you Africa aficionados out there know what it is called?

A-Hunting We Went

On Thursday, I went hunting for the first time in my life. I had called a friend in the late morning to see if he could help me with a project at home, but he was unavailable because he had plans to hunt, so I convinced him to let me tag along.

My friend warned me in advance that there would be a lot of walking, yet I was unprepared for the death march it turned out to be. We were out during the hottest part of the day, from 12:30 to 3:30 pm, in triple-digit heat under the direct sun. We walked at a fast pace, the fastest I could walk without jogging. The terrain was rugged nearly the entire way and most of it was through plant life with thorns and burrs. I was wearing sandals and capris, as I always do, and my feet got sliced so much that they were bleeding most of the time and I had to pick splinters out of my feet when I finally got home.

Given that I was already exhausted simply from walking so quickly under the hot sun, I could not fathom how the others found the energy to run at prey when they spotted it. There were perhaps 40 people in our hunting party, along with 10 or so dogs, and the group spread out to cover more territory. Each person was armed with a few branches, each 2.5 feet long, and often a slingshot. The branches were often weighted on one end with a knot of wood, and when prey was spotted, these batons were flung into the air, spinning round and round like a boomerang. After a few batons had struck the prey, often, but not always, a dog would charge in to finally catch the animal.

Hunters running after an animal that has been spotted

Ultimately, most people in our hunting party seemed to have caught something, either a rabbit or bird, from what I saw. My friend killed two animals. He said he usually eats his kills, but sometimes he sells them instead. I came home with nothing, as I intended. I had simply wanted to witness the hunt.

Two hunters displaying their kills: a rabbit for the man on the left and a bird (somewhat hidden by his hand) for the man on the right

The next day, I was fascinated to discover that my participation in the hunt was the talk of the town. Several people told me that they heard I had gone hunting and asked if it was true. Only men hunt in Sonsoro, which made my participation even more unusual. One woman told me that I should never go hunting again because as a woman, I have no business doing so. That, of course, only made me want to go hunting again to prove a point, but given how miserable I found the experience, I think my hunting days are indeed over.