The entire country is ablaze – one giant holocaust. With the cool, dry winds out of the Sahara comes the snowless and rainless winter. The fields are now full of stripped cornstalks. The countryside that was once dancing before my eyes in the wind is now lifeless and bare. There is no utility for anything left in the fields and wasting valuable time and energy in the blistering sun to clean the fields is for lack of a better word, pointless. That means, that in a country where machines that do the farming for you is about as silly as dancing for rain, the only thing to do is spark a fire. It is fast and it is efficient. It is also extremely dangerous to roofs made of straw. Smokey the Bear would have a hay day here. I think the Togolese people might see the other side of him, the one that mauls unintelligent campers who don’t completely put out the ashes.
My last trip to Kara left me with a very crisp image of an entire mountainside painted with a brilliant reddish-orange against a black, obscure sky. I was told that the fires would last until January when the scorched earth would be left smoldering in the equatorial sun. And while the dust and ash that permeates the air stirs up the allergies and cakes to sweating skin, it does create some of the most amazing sunsets that I have ever seen (pictures to come).
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