Travel- Kigale, Addis, Tucson -Farmers' Markets.

I'm just in from browsing through my local farmers' market here in Tucson and was struck by the animation and energy of my fellow shoppers - the same energy surrounds markets throughout the world. Music, kids, scents, voices, pushing, reaching, sniffing, squeezing. Something about outdoor food markets be they humble farm stands or bustling city block size creates energy.

On my recent trip to Africa, my route in Addis Ababa to the coffee shop took me past impromptu roadside stalls piled high with the seasonal green turning to red mangoes, papayas and bananas. Just mounds of somewhat bruised, often fly ridden, fresh fruit. The scent from the fruit heavy in the air, the impulse to reach out and buy a mango, a bunch of bananas almost irresistible. These were not the pretty, gussied up fruits snug in beds of green in neon lit, refrigerated shelves that we are used to here; this was fruit picked at peak, tossed into a truck, sometimes into a sack and carried on back or bicycle to the corner to be sold. The vendor, most likely a middleman, scrabbling for a living. Out in the country, tarps sheltered roadside displays of tomatoes - the stall usually tended to by very small children - their market , passing trucks whose drivers buy for a pittance and re sell on the city streets.



In Rwanda displays were more orderly. In the capital Kigali, the clean streets, neat houses - strikingly clean after the squaler of Addis - garden "hedges" of banana and papaya trees; women in brilliant batik dresses balancing Carmen Miranda style flat baskets loaded with coconuts, sweet potatoes, mangoes, tree tomatoes, avocados, weave their way deftly between traffic, pausing at yet another stall to assess the quality, ripeness of the offerings. On the road out of town passing through miles of rich land, every inch straight up the mountain side packaged into neat fields and tended by hand. More often than not a whole village chips in labor to help a neighbor get a crop into the ground or harvested. Corn, rice, maize, coffee, tea and of course "the Irish" as a standard potato is called. Bicycles, often being wheeled up hills, laden with sacks of potatoes, great branches of green bananas.


Eggs for sale miles from anywhere - a dozen at a time packaged in palm frond baskets, themselves a work of art.


On the coast in Kenya, mounds of coconuts, strings of fish, boys shimmying up trees to dislodge papayas. Wherever there is food and people, there is energy and apart from dress, language and prices - I see little difference between that energy in farmers' markets here in town and the street activity in Addis.


But there is a difference in taste - never have I eaten such juice rich - dripping down my shirt and running up my arms - mangoes. Flavor never experienced before - more mango taste than I thought possible. And the bananas - the pretty bunches in the supermarket here are a nodding cousin to these just picked, perhaps not pretty but incredibly creamy and rich fruits. There is something to be said for locavore moment; the buying what's in season and within a specific radius of home. Fruits and vegetables don't travel well at their peak.

"Here lady, here" the woman with the tin roofed stall on Bole Street in Addis would call as I walked past. "Good, good...." and she'd hold out an offering. Same thing at St. Philip's today - "Here, try the melon" the farmer from Dragoon urged me. I did and juice dripping down my chin I bought two of them. They have traveled very little, just from the fertile Alter valley in Cochise County. I watched a farmer from the same area cover his display of sweet corn with burlap he had dipped in ice water - "they like to stay cool" he told me, "heat dries out their sugar very quickly". I bought corn and funny shaped purple heirloom tomatoes grown just seven miles out of town but not without first taking in the fragrance of freshness.

The children were not in rags squatting on the ground this morning; no goats, sheep and donkeys wandered between the haphazardly placed stalls; the dogs the opposite of mangy and flea ridden were lining up for "gourmet, organic, gluten free" treats; the vendors arrived in their pickups and SUV's , none of them came in by bike nor hauled the sacks on their backs and certainly none of them would curl up under burlap to sleep. There were no horrible deformed, perhaps deliberately mutilated, children here crouched in the road, a pitiful vegetable or two in the dirt in front of them. The single cent they begged for in return for rotten produce they themselves had scavenged rthier only hope for eating that day.

Most of the in vendors in clean, beautifully landscaped St. Philip's Plaza today had sowed the seeds, hoed the land - though perhaps not by hand- and tended to, worried about their crops. Outdoor food markets whether the language Swahili, Amharic or English, have the same buzz, the same energy world over. The contrast between third and first world is humbling.

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