We are well into mango season and I couldn’t be happier. Right now I am averaging about half a dozen mangoes a day. I love them all. Even the not quite ripe ones are fabulous, like apples! Other than bananas, which are available year round, this is the first time I have had easy access to fruit. I am not the only one; my village is mango mad too! Everywhere you look you see people carrying a mango or two. The kids will fight over who gets the best piece of fruit. They are literally everywhere. I just walk outside my door, reach up and grab breakfast off of the nearest tree. Yummmm!!!!!!!!
I woke up this morning to an unusual sound. It was like a hail storm. Loud thumps as mysterious objects hit the ground. This was with the sound of the trees shaking it what sounded like a large winter storm. The kids were screaming and in general it was complete mayhem. My curiosity took me outside to see what was going on. I quickly discovered that it was the mangoes! My family was harvesting the mangoes to be sold in town. The boys were up in the trees shaking them so that the mangoes would fall to the ground. Everywhere I looked it was raining fruit. Occasionally one would knock you on the head, which accounted for the screaming kids. The women would pick them up off the ground and put them in large sacks. The few mangoes that survived the shaking would get knocked down with large sticks. They wouldn’t let me climb a tree (boys only apparently), but i did get a go with the big stick. It was very therapeutic. Luckily they left two of my family’s trees alone so we still have mangoes for us to eat. Who knew that harvesting fruit could be so much fun!
