Homemade Gardening

The girls decided to plant a garden. They borrowed a hoe from our neighbor (who probably looked upon the request with some amusement) and picked out a sunny patch of grass to hack to pieces. We now have a 2' x 5' rectangle of exposed earth in our yard with lettuce, spinach, and basil seeds ready to pop up and deliver salads unto us!

This is very much Andrea's and Katrina's baby. In fact, I've been asked not to help after I took a turn at the hoe and snapped the handle in half with a few hearty swings. Not my intention, I promise. Now I'll get to watch them plant and weed and tend to their field. Farmers Jacky and Jill.

To compensate for the violence I perpetrated against the hoe, I had the errand of finding a new one. I showed the wreckage to a hardware store owner in town and he pointed toward a carpentry shop around the corner that would craft a new handle. Woodworking is a pretty booming business in Kisoro. There's probably close to a dozen workshops in town that are advertised as such by the stacks of freshly made wooden furniture out front and the young men hard at work cutting and nailing and staining and scraping.

The owner of the carpentry shop that I found took one look at the broken hoe and handed it to a boy at a nearby worktable. The young woodworker promptly popped the head off the tool, grabbed a suitable piece of wood and a machete and got to work.

While I waited, I had time to admire the woodwork being done around me by other craftsmen. A family waited on a bench for a large door to be finished. A young man in coveralls was tracing a gentle curve on the corners of the door with a flexible saw blade and pencil. With his guidelines drawn, he used a machete to hack off big pieces first and then, swinging closer and closer to his line but never over it, cleaved away thin slices of excess door. In just a few minutes, he'd sculpted a very smooth and precise curve with a tool that we associate with slashing through a forest.

Meanwhile, the boy at the worktable had used his machete to whittle a thick dowel from a very square-shaped plank. He then ran a small hand plane over the surface, shaving off the bumps and leaving a rod as neat and even as if it had been passed through a machine. Finally, the iron tool head was fixed on and held in place with scraps of wood wedged tightly between the head and handle. The work was done and I owed 2,000 shillings, but all I had was a 5,000 shilling bill so we called it a tip and I walked home the proud owner of a handsomely restored farming implement.

Watching the process got me thinking about how little I know about the way things are made in my country. The origin of most of the things we use is hidden behind distant factory walls. We’re able to buy furniture, computers, even food without needing to know much about where these things came from or what they’re made of.

In a town like Kisoro there are plenty of examples of goods shipped in from far away, made from unfamiliar materials: mountains of used clothing from America, electronics from China and Korea, cars from Japan, packaged food from the Middle East. But there are also many prolific makers here, not just sellers. From furniture to food, you can find hundreds of examples of ingeniously used local resources here. I wonder about how this changes your relationship with the things you have. Knowing where they came from, how they were made…