Samuel Kallon 
Africa 24 news
A veteran swamp rice grower traces back his past bitter experience as a poor farmer.
“We have dug up swamps, and swamps way back for rice growing or beds for groundnuts or potatoes planting, and we have cut palm tree heads many and many times in the past,” says man from Lunsar, Port Loko.
He now lives in Koindagu district after he left Tonkolili some years ago.
The two districts share boundary between the Temne people and the Korankoes in north of Sierra Leone.
The farmer seems to express regrets for still being poor from those days he was still young and a hardworking man.
He said he and his colleague friends who had been cutting palm tree heads and were working on swamps are still finding life hard for themselves. The one is growing a drug plant. He has given up farming.
While another of his main friend has died years ago.
“Sorie Loko is dead, my another friend is doing cannabis sartivia in Koindagu district,” he remembers.
Sierra Leoneans still do subsistence farming and because of this they have remained poor as peasants.
The farmers get old so early because of the hard labour work they do to get a living for themselves and family.
The man who appears to be in his late 50s says he doesn’t have the same energy now to do the same work he and his friends in the past had been doing in some swamps in rice growing and vegetables planting and in the bush pulling palm tree heads for palm oil, he explained while he was sitting looking far away in nostalgia.
