Cutting Down a Banana Tree & Harvesting Chocolate

So some of the funnest times in the village were when we where able to go to the garden with our wasfamili.

First we went to kaikai(food), which included kaukau(similar to sweet potato), taro and cooking bananas.

This is the garden.

Kaukau

 

Cutting down a banana tree.

The fruit of my labor.

Taro

The cool thing about this root vegetable is that they dig it up, get what is good and then plant it again for more to grow.

Another time we went to the garden to get fire wood. All of our meal were cooked over the fire so fire wood is very important.

Then we went to harvest cacao.

We went with our wassusa Alice. She uses this really long stick with a hook on the end to get the pods down.

We helped but collecting all the pods.

Nen, our wasmama would then cut them in half.

Here is what they look like inside. The actual cacao bean is the black part.

You can suck on the outer white part, it is really sweet and so good.

We then helped get the beans out of the pods.

Here is a video of that process. 

We filled this bucket up twice.

Towards the end we were able to try getting one off of the tree. It was way harder then I thought.

We had so much fun and learned so much about what it takes to get everyday things like food and fire wood to cook the food. Also to be a part of helping harvest one of their cash crops was so rewarding. 

Up next you will see how we did with fishing in the ocean.