Planting season is a slow time for me and literacy classes in rural Congo. If they don’t stop altogether for those weeks, they usually slow down to maybe a review class per week to keep students from forgetting. In cities, people like following the academic calendar. So we throw a big International Literacy Day celebration in Kinshasa every year for publicity purposes and to encourage participants. This year we will celebrate 10 years of working together. We’ve got a refresher seminar for teachers planned for this weekend in Kinshasa and are working on the details for a teacher-training in Boma, a port city near the ocean. In the meantime, my hands are full preparing and selling garden seeds. In the 80s Lusekele was the main garden seed source for all of Bandundu province, and, though Center attention has moved to other things, it is remembered and people still ask for seeds from Lusekele agents. Dry season is prime time for vegetable gardens, when people can’t forage for wild greens and manioc greens get scarce and tough.
One doesn’t make much money selling seed at the prices village people are willing to buy them at (4-9 cents/ package), but I see it as a service. In the past 2 months I’ve prepared and sold somewhere around 550 packages of seeds for amaranth greens, bilolo (a popular broad-leafed green in the eggplant family), chili peppers, tomato and malabar spinach. I’ve not been able to supply requests for collard seeds, cabbage, okra, eggplant and celery seeds. In the case of celery, the seed viability in our heat and humidity is too short for unrefrigerated seeds. My most enthusiastic customers are Vanga Hospital patients and their helpers, from all over the region. I get mobbed every time I go there. As I sell, I dispense gardening advice: prepare a special seedbed for your seeds up off the ground so that wandering chickens, goats, pigs or grasshoppers don’t kill the majority of sprouts before they get strong enough, and so that you can take better care of them.
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