Each week I spend a little time helping out at a tree nursery located about five kilometers from my home in Kalalé. Depending upon the season, you'll find two colleagues and I transplanting trees and vegetable sprouts, preparing a compost heap, tending to a small garden, pumping water into storage towers, grafting mango trees and more! But no matter the season you'll always find us talking- my colleagues laughing as I, often stunned, learn important lessons about both Beninese culture and life. Most frequently I find myself learning about the Beninese work culture, in this obviously appropriate location.
One day, as we cared for our plants, I started posing some of my quite famous questions. I asked about how much my colleagues earn through the work we are doing in the nursery. Abou, the senior technician, explained to me what benefits they recieve from the nursery. The nursery is run by an assembly, or association, that was formed eighteen years ago when a German group offered up aid to valorize a local water reserve. Using a gas-powered engine and large hoses, the nursery staff pumps water from the reserve into two concrete towers that are around maybe fifteen feet tall and a decent distance from the reserve.
Much time is spent just getting water to the nursery, cleaning the grounds, and watering the plants. Two days a week we show up, and try to cram in basic maintaince work and expand the nursery's stock. Most things take longer than an American might expect, we hardly are ever able to finish the work we set out to do.
So, Abou explains how much they earn monetarily, and I try to equate the count of work and energy put into the nursery and how much one theoretically would earn. His sum and mine aren't the same, they earn very little for their labor. I learn that they, like many Beninese people, literally have to dabble in several different types of work to make enough money for their family's to live off of, and then to provide an environment in which their family can maybe thrive.
I'm wondering, why do they do it; why do they labor here for a significant enough portion of the week for little, in a society where people do little unless there is a financial incentive?
So Abou explained it to me.
Abou's father and Moustarou's (the other colleague) father are both a part of the original assembly. Someone is needed to run the nursery, really what has become their fathers' nursery, and thus their own. Abou emphatickly states, "Ça c'est à nous;" that is to us, that is on us. Let of explain, the nursery is their own, it must be cared for. Other options of abandoning the nursery until someone comes along to care for it, or not, are unfathomable. This has become their inheritance, even if the assembly is non-profit. My colleagues motivation to work is not financial gain, but the need to retain self and familial respect. To leave the nursery is to render the work of your parents ultimately fruitless, something that a collective, tradition-bound society is VERY slow to do.
Something about the ownership of the products and well-being pleases my spirit. I think about Marx's criticism, or observation, about the effects of industrialization. Marx noted that humans became alienated from the fruits of their labor, because in modern socities the end product is not associated with the anonymous factory worker or person in an office. Often humans when feel alienated from their work in more developed locals.
With Abou's words I saw connection to his product, his co-workers, and his offsprings; Abou is far from alienated from his environment. I don't know what this implies for other lives, but for my own life it stokes my desire to remain emotionally-tied to my labor and its outcomes. Abou's life suggests to me the importance of thinking about one's actions in how they will affect the world or one's offspring seven generations from now. When we see how we are connected to a picture bigger than our own self-portrait, a self-respecting, world-respecting person may begin to choose to act and think in ways that do not always go along with "normal" cultural values. And perhaps, just maybe, one will even find some developing a greater sense of self- and world-respect.
