Planting Rice on an African Farm

April 22nd, 2006

 I have a very special memory of Liberia as a teenager. It was the time I went ‘upcountry’ with my Liberian friend Kay to spend two weeks in her village. One day we planted rice. It all began on a hot sultry day as Kay and I, along with her little sisters, trudged along a red dirt road for over an hour under the blazing African sun. Arriving at the fields which Kay’s aunt and uncle owned, we gulped down some filtered water from our canteens, then sat down to put on our rain boots. You see, we needed those boots for sloshing through the muddy fields, which had been drenched with buckets of water!

The job that day for each one of us girls, was to dig our own little strip and seed it with rice.  To make the work fun, we raced each other. I lost the race, seeing my boots got stuck in the mud, tumbling me over! We all burst into peals of laughter, then collapsed in exhaustion under the shade of a tall palm tree. After regaining our composure, we cheerfully celebrated our completed task by chanting loudly the African rice song: "Planting rice is no fun, bent from morn till set of sun. Cannot stand and cannot sit; cannot rest for a little bit!"