Sunday, May 28, 2006

What kind of neighbor do you have?

Yesterday afternoon, we were out in the yard full of kids playing games and soccer and our neighbors from across the street were out in their yard. We walked over to chat (of course, with our limited vocabulary) and the subject of trees and what they are good for came up.
The past few days they have been picking coffee berries and had some drying in their yard. Of course this hooked Joel and his curiosity in the whole process was peaked!
They also have a banana tree in their yard with a beautiful flower on it and so I asked what it was called. This led to us talking about how to know when bananas were good and it dawned on me to ask them about the bananas on the trees in our yard. We have two clusters on two different trees but one looks better than the other. So we invited them to our yard to have a look.
The gentelman (we still haven't been able to completely understand his name yet so for now we'll call him Pak Neighbor) took one look and said the tree was dead. Well it hangs directly over our laundry patio and so I asked how we should take care of it. He said it should be cut down or it will break the roof when the bananas fall. So we offered him the job!!
Now in our minds, we're thinking he may come back tomorrow with what he needs and take care of it but before we knew what was happening, he had a ladder, a pole wite a string on it and a machete. He climbed the laddar tied the string around the trunk of the tree way up high and began chopping away at the cluster of bananas. In just a minute the whole lot of them was coming down just feet away from me, missing our roof by just inches!
The best part... the bananas were still going to be good and would continue ripening off the tree. He chopped down the rest of the trunk and carried it off into the back area behind our yard. We still don't know enough of the culture to know what to do now, whether to pay him or just say thanks. So Joel called our friends who have been here longer and they said to offer his family the cluster of bananas. So that's what we did. We told them the other cluster was more than enough for our family and that they were welcome to take the one he cut down home to enjoy!
What an event! I bet you don't have a neighbor who climbes trees and chops them down for you in just seconds!

4 comments:

jmp said...

No, I can't say I have one right now, but that reminds me so much of Guyana. Well, except the coffee part! How do the bananas taste, or are they not ripe yet?

jmp said...

Oh, now that I look at the pictures I can see that they aren't ripe. I bet they'll be good though!

Teri said...

Imagine that, banana chopping neighbors! How the Lord blesses!

Tom Demers said...

So, when do you start making your own coffee?