"Batte-pois"

September 2009 -

The four young men on the old concrete threshing floor beat black beans from their pods with sticks they cut from a tree nearby, it could be a hundred years ago but for the style of their shorts and the cheap plastic sandals. Their shirts off, they glisten at first then the dust of the threshing covers them evenly, without changing the intensity of the blackness that the strong sunlight gives them, though some are more red-hued than others. This coffee drying area is also used for the other crops, the roofed area with the husking machine at one end gives shade - there is the usual audience of an old man, someone's pretty young girlfriend - already pregnant - a stray toddler in a shirt and nothing else, small boys walking by with various things on their heads, a rooster hangs by its feet from a string in one child's hand. One older woman, who arrived with a flat round basket a yard across on her head, attends and keeps an eye on the quantity of beans while sweeping with a bunch of leafy twigs, her own children have a stake in this.

The beans are called pois noirs, or pwa nwa - most everyone eats about half a cup a day of them here, when they can get them, that would make the amount just threshed - in the hot sun by two teams of four men, and other helpers to sweep the beans and pods into piles, remove the pods by carrying them away in huge piles on an old blanket, bag in old rice sacks, and carry away to storage - serve a very small family for a year. But many people here have six to ten children... and these particular beans were from a very large field...

Pwa nwa are served in crushed boiled maize mush, or in rice, or as a sauce, as a thin soup with yams and green bananas in it... they are a pleasant mild tasting bean, not as insipid as the other local varieties.

Coming from the north I somehow have never thought of beans as needing to be threshed, or even as a daily food... How they get into those plastic one kilo bags in the supermarket never crosses our minds. Here, families who cannot pay the annual school fees of 250 Gourdes, or about $8 US, can contribute two one-gallon measures of beans (two marmites, or cooking-pots full) to the school lunch program... still a hardship for some.