The countryside

     When you spend most of your time in the ETU, the neighboring hospital and the housing, you can forget what the rest of the countryside looks like.  Of course you see what is along side of the road when you go to meetings.  But those are areas that have been influenced by the presence of the road.  These roads are conduits of the vehicles, pedestrian traffic and commerce of the region.  Farther away from the roads, you find a more baseline culture.  Small villages of maybe 100 people that often have only footpaths connecting them to anyplace else.  The consist of a group of small buildings of clay with either corrugated metal or thatch roofs.  Often, the livestock is kept in the compounds.  That is how the majority of the 750,000 people of Nimba county live.

     And the countryside is jungle.  Maybe not jungle is the way that we learned when we were children, but jungle nonetheless.  Certainly there are many clearings, both man made and natural, but the large majority of the land is green and densely vegetated.  Some of the land, but not as much as I was used to in Haiti where every potentially arable piece of land, was cultivated.  The land is held in common by the villages.  If you want to farm some land, you can get permission from the village leadership to farm there.  You can keep the crops but there is an expectation that the food is to be shared.  Since the land is held in common, that only makes sense.  Even if you have worked the land for years, you are still not the owner.  The land belongs to the village.  However, working the land helps you to maintain your claim for usage.  

     The countryside is a lush green wherever you look.  From the top of the hill where we sleep, the land is covered with large leafed trees and shrubs.  There is almost always a haze or fog that covers the low lying land which is much denser in the morning.  Sometimes there is so much haze that the helicopters can't  fly.  There must be a meteorologic factor involved, but there is also a lot of moisture coming up from the foliage which contributes.  I am not sure how much this haze varies throughout the year, but it has certainly been a constant the last two months.  I guess that I will have a few more months to find out.