Nestled in the beautiful agricultural region of the south near a village called Adjohoun we found our second WWOOF farm. We stayed in the home of Apollinaire, an eccentric 57 year old semi-retired geography teacher who had decided to make his millions growing pineapples.
Here he lived with his lovely family, Mariete his wife, Constellia and Noscarelle his daughters and José-Merry his four year old son. They welcomed us as if we were actual family members, sharing every aspect of family life whether we liked it or not! The house was a two storey cement block building though the second floor was unfinished and uninhabited. The living room, where most time was spent, is decorated with plastic flowers and posters of semi naked women in sexy poses (very strange – we never got a chance to ask where they had come from), the centre piece of the room an inflatable Father Christmas. Here we shared dinner, played with the children and had to pass the evening watching terrible Spanish soaps translated into French. This daily ritual was often interrupted by power-cuts, an annoying fact of life here; it felt like there were more power-cuts than power!
Our bedroom was one of three and was decorated with posters of Shakira, Britney, Beyonce, and some soft porn, again very strange! A flimsy piece of cloth concealed a toilet and bucket shower which passed as a bathroom and wasn’t a very fragrant place as it was located directly over the cess pit! A gang of feral cats also shared the house with us defecating wherever they pleased and being generally unfriendly except at meal times.
The house was set in two hectares of lush tropical vegetation. Although it didn’t look like your traditional farm the land was very productive, banana, avocado, papaya, orange, palm and coconut trees were dotted throughout. Pineapples, manioc and bisap were grown at ground level making the land doubly fruitful. This complimentary way of farming was very interesting to see in action. Apollinaire also had a vegetable patch that had just been harvested when we arrived. The produce from the land not only fed the family but made a very decent profit at market. This land alongside his other 14 hectares (which were situated elsewhere) combined to make Apollinaire a substantial amount of money. As he said “man will always need to eat” and as he pointed out with populous Nigeria next door farming is very lucrative.
Apollinaire made farming look effortless, forget rigorously ploughed fields his land looked more like a jungle and working with nature definitely worked for him. As well as food crops he also kept livestock, chickens and ducks in small coops and goats in a crumbling roofless building adjacent to the house. Hens with chicks ran freely and the cockerels were taken out of the main coop each morning to inspire their libidos! The animals were sold or eaten when ready and were a great source of compost for the crops.
Apollinaire was obsessed with compost utilising all food waste and coveting any dung he came across on his wanders. He also kept two puppies tied to rocks as guard dogs as well as a crocodile in a dustbin and a tortoise in a bucket. The essence of a pet is not really understood here!
Although part of the WWOOF organisation and very productive there was little work for us to do and if anything Apollinaire was reluctant to let us lift a finger at all. He was an incredibly nice man but we found this extremely frustrating. The one day we managed to bully him into letting us work we planted a patch of pineapples. Neither of us had ever seen a pineapple growing, we had both imagined they grew on trees, as we found out they grow at ground level.
You plant the crown which becomes a massive aloe-vera like plant with the fruit taking one or two years to develop and then springing surprisingly from the spiky folds. The plant only produces one fruit but many crowns which means your productivity grows healthily year on year. Although we protested, Apollinaire only let us work for one hour then insisted we rested. Our tee-shirts were sweat soaked which he took as a sign of exhaustion not knowing the wringable state of our clothes after a night of dancing!
Due to Apollinaire’s determination for us not to do anything we decided without really asking to free the tortoise from a life of milling around in its own waste in the darkness of the covered bucket. We were sorry not to help the crocodile living in similar conditions however we did not have the building materials to secure him and his understandable anger from the children. We knocked together a wooden frame, covered it in chicken wire (thankful for our tetanus jabs), and secured it in a sandy trench. We incorporated various different terrains for the pleasure of the tortoise however when we introduced him to his new home all he wanted to do was sit in the corner! Hopefully he will get over his trauma and get used to his new life of freedom!
Although the farm is extremely productive and there could have been a lot to learn Apollinaire and his family seemed more inclined to treat us as guests rather than visitors who had come to gain skills working on a farm. Their hospitality however was enormous and the hard work of the Mariete and Constellia was especially appreciated. It was a pleasure to meet and get to know a Beninoise family and we truly hope that all Apollinaire’s pineapple and piscine-culture (fish farming which he plans to start soon) enterprises bring him and his family great rewards. For us however our quest for farming knowledge continues!
