Endless turned earth where the yams are planted each to its own dip in the red ground, each with it's supporting pole like a soldier, there is strength in numbers but also the voracity of locusts.

Subsistence - kay where the reddish children, hair in twists yellowing at the tips, stand bunched in doorways, one for each year of a farmer's married life.

Patience - the mule hobbled in another century.

Nothing here was made in a factory at first glance, except the plastic baubles in the little girls' hair and the father's broken sandals.

The children are too shy to say "Bon Swa" but as we go down hill a small voice from behind the piled rock fence calls "Blan, blan" and a hand waves from the obscurity of the mud and thatch house. Twenty metres square perhaps, and the only chair is child-sized - here no-one has ever had enough.

kay - house

bon swa - bonsoir

blan - white or foreign person