Greetings from Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, where my husband Sekou and I have been spending the month of February. We’ve been here since the end of December working on the final construction phase of our first home here in Bassam - a beachside resort community just east of central Abidjan. We built 3 units on the property - two will be vacation rentals and one is our “pied-a-terre.” Unlike the US, they do not enforce occupancy permits on new construction here, so many people - like us - move into their homes before they are complete. We have all the comforts of home now, including city water, electricity, a full western-style kitchen, A/C (a requirement) and even a bathtub in our master bath. This is amazing to me considering how difficult it is to source building materials, PLUS our building crew lacks almost all of the power tools we consider essential for construction in the USA. Our kitchen and bath cabinets were built using a hand saw. The concrete used to make our 3, 3-story townhouses was all mixed by hand with a shovel. The building products to complete the third story on the buildings were all hoisted using pulleys and manpower. It’s really astounding the quality of workmanship that can be accomplished using just one’s hands.

Although Abidjan is a modern city of approximately 6 million people, it is still developing- and rapidly growing. Our property in Bassam was farmland just a few years ago, next to a small fishing village called Moossou Ouest. Now the village is surrounded by high rise apartment buildings and homes like ours. On our red clay street we have two small grocery stores, a bar, a take out restaurant, and a couple of fast-food Attieke stands (a product made from cassava usually served with fish).

This morning I am sitting at my window watching the village farmers hand “plowing” a field with hoes that are almost identical to an artifact displayed in the museum of civilization in Abidjan. A five-man crew has made quick work of about a quarter acre of marsh grass using machete and hoes. It has been cleared and mounds of dirt have been created to plant some kind of squash or melon. I used to watch such work and think, “why haven’t they adopted more modern practices to make the work easier?” This is a very American way of thinking - our near-obsession with progress and improvement.

What I have learned by spending more time here is from the local’s perspective, these practices have been working on this very land for thousands of years, so why change them now? Why use lots of resources to make and obtain a tractor and the fuel it requires, when 5 men with hoes and machetes can do the same thing? Especially when there are so many young people here who are ready to work. (98% of the country’s population is under the age of 65. Almost 40% of the population is under the age of 15.) This 5-man crew is creating no carbon footprint in the process of producing food for their community, they certainly don’t need a membership to a gym, and there is camaraderie in their hard work. The men are often singing when they walk past our house at the end of their day in the fields. What a contrast to the industrial agricultural complex that provides most of our food in the US. Is modernization and the industrialization that inevitably follows always better? I’m not so sure anymore.

Koné Consulting
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