Cotton Clouds

Shortly after leaving Yamoussoukro, the green tones of the southern vegetation give way to the aridity of the north. I am experiencing the reverse transition process that I experienced almost 3 months ago when I was pedaling south from the Burkinabe Sahel to the fertile south of Ghana. Back on the dirt roads, my clothes and skin turn orange. The sun burns high, contracting my pupils. Dust particles floating in the air leave the sky agonising in a pale blue and mute the hues of trees and shrubs. Once again, under this opaque palette where the world loses its three-dimensionality, the reminiscences with the previous transition do not end.

With the capital now behind me, I have ahead of me the entire Ivorian rural world all for myself. Now I can pedal in peace on the back roads, although not for long. Shortly after leaving the town of Kongaso, an idle gendarme, sheltered under the shade of a tree by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, orders me to stop. I don't know which is bigger if the surprise at my arrival or the confusion of not knowing what to do with me there. What is clear to me is that I have come to take away the boredom that had him sunk up to his neck in a plastic chair semi-melted by the very hot air. Without a doubt, I am the most exciting thing that has happened to him since he joined the forces of the gendarmerie.

Trying to hide his perplexity, he asks me what I am doing there and where I am going, but he tells me that he cannot let me pass until he consults with his superiors. I'm in high spirits and don't feel like arguing, so I park my bike while he takes his phone to start making calls. By now, there are few things that irritate me. Patience is one of the greatest gifts that so many moments of African bureaucracy have given me. Not only do I not get irritated, but I use even the smallest details to amuse myself such as seeing that his cracked monochrome screen and fractured casing Nokia saw more action since it left the factory in China than he did in his career as a gendarme in this forgotten corner of Ivory Coast. Meanwhile, while on the other side of the phone they keep transferring him from one person to another to get rid of him, I take a selfie with him on the phone and another curious gendarme who has just arrived on a motorcycle. It takes him half an hour to obtain a satisfactory answer in order to allow me to continue, but right before leaving, he and his colleague warn me that I am about to enter a bandit-infested area.

Damn it! I go from a relaxed smile to tense every muscle of my face. As I had experienced in southern Burkina Faso and northern Ghana, I am pedaling again in fear. Now, loneliness no longer gives me peace but anxiety. Silence and the absence of people do not help. The feeling of riding the bike fearing that at any moment I could be ambushed is simply horrible. Part of me tries to focus on the footfalls on the pedals, the sound of gravel crunching under the wheels, or the hot air brushing against my sticky skin, but there is another subconscious part that is in a permanent state of alert. It is as if I was trying to listen to the sounds beyond the bushes, fantasising that someone may be hiding behind them, watching, lurking, ready to strike. In moments like these, the minutes turn into hours, it is the thoughts more than any actual fact that assail me. All I want is for more people to be around because when there are people, most of them are good, and the bad seeds are neutralised among them.

Things don't get better when I reach the next big town. The faces of the people I see as I pass change. There is something about them that does not inspire me any confidence. On top of this, in the middle of the town, I find a UN fortress, the perimeter of which is guarded by watchtowers where blue helmet soldiers stand on guard holding machine guns. There, I realise that this is a region that until not many years ago was one of the hotbeds of conflict in the Ivorian civil war. To this day, the UN is based here and there's nothing truly appealing about this place for me to stay. Quite the contrary, I'd rather take a little more risk and move on to get out of this area as soon as possible. Fortunately, things would not take long to improve.

Cotton clouds

Towards the end of the day, with a lower and weaker sun, I arrive at a village breathing dust. The heat and nerves have left me without strength. With the sunset, the opaque palette now turns towards the bluish grays. Accompanying to the usual huts of every day, now some mountains of cotton in the form of flat cakes or truncated pyramids define the silhouette of the horizon clouded by the density of particles floating in the air. I am already at the heart of the cotton country.

As usual, when I officially start looking for a place to sleep, I get off my bike. This makes it much easier for me to get in touch with people and start a conversation. Actually, it others who almost always take the first step. In a remote African village, a white man on a bicycle is too tempting a novelty to resist. I am walking next to the bike among thousands of cotton balls scattered on the ground. I see a group of children playing among stacks of old tires by the side of the road. They look at me between laughs and shy glances when I decide to stop to take some photos of them. Given the positive energy that I perceive from the people who approach me, I ask to speak to the head of the village to ask permission to spend the night there.

I arrive at the door of his house escorted by the children I was playing with on the side of the road. Mohammed, the chief of the village, a deep black-skinned man in his late 60’s wraps my right hand between both of his hands before I even started introducing myself and doesn't let it go. I can feel the rough and cracked texture of someone who has grown a thick skin working in the fields over the years and yet, hasn’t lost the warmth of affection. He listens to me with the affection of a grandfather. The serene expression of his smile comforts me. It immediately makes me feel like my question barely makes sense because permission has already been granted to me beforehand. As I tell him about me, he begins to walk slowly, paying careful attention while never letting go of me. When we arrive at the door of a hut near his house, he signals to one of his grandchildren in the local dialect to free it up for me. There, I will be able to spend the night and also have dinner with the family.

The children run out to get my bike to bring it to the hut. When I go in to drop off my panniers, I see that the inside of the adobe walls is wrapped with posters of Didi Drogba, the Ivorian football god who triumphed in the English Premier League. Being in there, looking at the images, I remember the walls of the room I grew up in, which I wallpapered with posters of heavy metal bands. I smile because I can see clearly that adolescence has no nationality, race, or creed. Whether it is in a hut in a far-flung village of Ivory Coast or in a middle-class apartment building in Buenos Aires, adolescents grow up searching in our idols for someone to admire and reflect on in the absence of an identity that we have not yet been able to define. This is the true globalisation, not that of the economy, commerce, and telecommunications, but the one that has always existed, that of the primordial humanity that intrinsically connects us all since the beginning of time.

Once the daily stress of finding a place to sleep is left behind, it is almost a ritual for me to remove my sandals and sit on the floor to capture with my eyes and my heart the fragments of African life. People will never ever stop bringing me a chair. Almost always, it is the first thing that people offer me because it is unacceptable for them to have a guest sitting on the floor, let alone a white one. However, I explain that I like it and in that way, I try to show them that deep down we are not that different. I like to feel the ground, the connection with the earth, I like to walk barefoot even though sometimes it’s thorny or it burns. Sitting on a mud step, I watch African life go by. In front of me, a baby takes a bath in a bucket full of dark water and looks at me with suspicious eyes. In between, another boy runs by barefoot and full of dust, struggling to keep in motion an old bicycle tire that is taller than him. Meanwhile, Mohammed's family and neighbours come over to greet me. They look at me, they smile, and we ask each other many questions until nightfall when I dine with them under the flickering light emitted by a faint light bulb.

Everyone to work

Clarity marks the beginning of each day, especially in Africa. The spaces of silence are breaking little by little as the sky clears. First with the women. Some go and others come with jerrycans of water on their heads while others carry wood to make a fire. They talk as they pass, they greet, they give instructions to the youngest. The older sisters take care of the little ones and attend to the crying of the babies. The children start to play screaming early on while the men prepare things to go to the plantations. Little by little the village begins to move and by the time the sun rises on the horizon, life is already in full swing.

We are in the middle of the harvest season and to my surprise, or perhaps not so much anymore, the only people left in the village are the elders and the babies. The rest of the men and women of all ages, boys, and girls from 5 or 6 years old and up, all go to work without exception. Jean, Mohammed's eldest son, drives a tractor that pulls a trailer shaped like a metal cage where more than a dozen people of all sizes are crammed together. As we make our way down a path that tunnels through long rows of cashew trees, Jean tells me that the tractor we are riding on is not theirs. The Pakistani cotton company that buys the fruit of the harvest from all the villages in the region provides them for them to do their work. The broad tires crush the leaves’ crust on the ground. We go slow, shaking from side to side, absorbing the vibrations of the tractor, until we reach one of the edges of the plantation to be harvested where the platoon descends.

When we arrive, there are already groups of women with pots on the fire preparing what will be the lunch of the villagers who harvest during the day. From that starting point, dozens of people enter the cotton fields equipped with no more than a simple burlap bag strapped to their waists. The task has simple mechanics but that doesn't make it easy. The plantation is a thick maze of thin-stemmed, multi-branched shrubs from whose ends the cotton balls sprout. As they break through, the sharp edges of the branches rip the garments and draw white lines on the black skin of the gatherers, gradually exfoliating it until leaving open scratches. Nonetheless, they all seem to be immune to discomfort. The density makes it difficult for adults to move, who must penetrate the field sometimes with brute force. Boys and girls, due to their size, move more easily, but pulling out the balls in the upper half of bushes taller than them is not only exhausting and sometimes outright impossible.

A fleeting glance at the horizon reveals thousands of white marbles glowing incandescent in the sun in just a fraction of the harvestable area. No matter how many people work, the task of collecting one by one by hand seems as laughable as it is unattainable. However, doing ant work, people fill bag after bag throughout the day. The white dots are disappearing from the plantation while the mountains of cotton grow proportionally around the perimeter of it. During the day, many throw themselves on them exhausted to take a break.

From there, the cotton is scooped into the trailers to take it to the village storage huts, but to minimise the number of trips it is important to compress it as much as possible. For this, there are no mechanical pistons, not even rudimentary instruments, but the innocence of children who amuse themselves by jumping on it. They play dirty, malnourished, with their little legs' skin cracked by the constant rubbing of the balls and jumping until they pant with fatigue. The image of them laughing their butts off while doing so distorts the perception of what I am witnessing. Their ability to have fun doing so does not change the tragedy that is the ultimate reality that these children are working rather than being in school. The joy that they radiate when I see them enjoying themselves so much is so contagious that I must make a deliberate effort not to forget that I am in the presence of child labour and that is not to laugh but to cry.

Throughout the afternoon, the trailers arrive at the village fully loaded. The same one in which Jean had taken people in the morning, now comes back overflowing with cotton while the people walk back. Arrival in the village does not mark the end of the day. Now it's time to unload and store the yield of the harvest. A large part is kept inside the storage huts, where more children wait to jump on it in order to be able to fit as much as possible. The surplus remains outside, forming cotton cakes that grow in number and size over the days until they reconfigure the entire silhouette of the village and its structure. Now they just have to wait for the truck from the processing company to come and pick it up.

During harvest time, the truck arrives once a week in each village, sometimes more. It parks in the freed space that serves as a loading platform surrounded by the cakes ready to be loaded. Next to it, the company sets up a tent with an industrial scale underneath and a makeshift desk, behind which a supervisor with a notebook and pen in hand writes down every kilo for which he will have to pay. Villagers arrive carrying cotton wrapped in large burlap blankets for weighing. All around the scale, there are constant discussions about the accuracy of the weight. Those of the company watch that the villagers do not cheat to manipulate the true weight. Each load involves a small dispute for every single gram that might be in excess or missing until everyone reaches consensus and the manager finally records the weight in the notebook.

At the foot of the truck, a team of teenagers works assembling bundles of cargo. Four meters above huddled on a great mountain of white balls, a group of no less than 16 men receives them and throws them under their feet. At first glance, the truck is already loaded at least twice its capacity and no one shows any intention of stopping the load. The excess weight is evident when seeing the cotton balls pop out through the cracks between the aged wooden planks that form the side frame of the truck. Just as the children turned the compression into a game, the men here turned it into a dance while singing in unison. One of them leads by setting the pace and by scraping a short iron bar on the rough surface of a metal can. They all keep turning in a little circle. With each step they take, they sink their boots into the cotton, compressing it more and more. Once there is no empty corner in which to fit a new ball, the truck leaves for the processing plant. From there it will be transferred to the port, some 700 km to the south, from where it will sail to the great centers of textile production in the world, in this case, Karachi, in Pakistan where it will be transformed into the clothes that we will later wear.

As is the case with all commodities, the price of cotton is defined by the market on the stock exchanges of New York, London, Hong Kong, regardless of the quantity, quality, and working conditions that entire communities have to carry out to produce it. They do not work to earn money, much less to save it, but simply to get to the end of another day with some food. They are the first link in a long chain that later, on our side of the world, will allow us to buy $ 3 T-shirts at Kmart or H&M while still getting upset because they don't cost half. Many of us, also pressured by the excessive cost of living in the places where we live with increasingly precarious wages, when we go shopping we tend to easily forget and even ignore some of the critical factors that make cost reduction possible. It is the vicious cycle of things that are still wrong in the world.

Without probably having much idea of everything that happens higher up in the chain, be it women, men, adolescents, or children, each in their own way, they find a way to generate the inner resources necessary to transform the harshness of their lives into a more enjoyable task that at least doesn't exacerbate its toughness. That is why, despite the hardship, I have seen more smiles than heard complaints and laments. When it comes to me, I can say that the extreme contrast between an intolerable life in the sight of any average Westerner and the lightness with which these people carry the peace of their smiles leaves me completely perplexed. Seeing such hard labour for so little in return hurts me deep down, but that stoic ability they have to still lead their life smiling instills in me a sense of love, courage, and deep respect. I don't think they truly understand how much they help me grow by seeing their example.