grass burning 2009

So once again it is time for grass burning season. This is also known in some circles as "winter". AKA it lasts maybe 3-4 months. Anyways, around the end of July, as it happened last year as well, some stranger takes it upon themselves to burn the grass behind our house. It always comes dangerously close to setting me and my possessions on fire, considering the wall you see below is actually the wall of MY room. Anyways, I digress. We cut a moat-like area around our house so that the fire stops a couple of feet away. If you don't do this you actually have about a 95% your house will catch fire, as it is almost guaranteed that if you don't burn your grass someone else will. The reason for this is that the grass grows to about my shoulder height (5 feet?) pretty much everywhere by the end of the summer due to that massive amount of rain KZN gets. This is very different from Limpopo Province (where I spent my first 2 months in training), which is similar to a barren wasteland. Limpopo does not have the kaleidescope green affect of KZN during the summer where the grass is so tall and green and bright that your eyes hurt. The burning also replenishes the soil for farming or so I’m told by my Zulu friends. However, after a quick googling (due to a hunch on my part) I discovered it is only positive for soil when the land is burned only every few decades or so, but in actuality yearly burning causes depletion of nutrients in the soil and makes it difficult to farm…

A scary thing about the burning season is that people insist on burning the grass next to the main road to town during the day (also at night, or so I am told, as I am basically stranded in my village after 6pm). This is a two lane road in which cars go speeds up to 70 MPH. So, a couple of weeks ago we were chugging along in a taxi and there was a lot of smoke up ahead to the point where you couldn’t see anything in front of us. Of course there was a car stalled in our lane. So, with little to no hesitation the taxi driver blindly goes into the incoming lane to pass the car (which is a normal practice here...during regular driving conditions). If a car had been coming down the lane we would have been in serious trouble…So while burning is fun to watch and its results make for an interesting winter landscape, my conclusion is that it is dangerous (every year a family or two’s house burns down—last year with the family inside of it), bad for the soil, and all in all isn’t a very good idea. And this completes my rant on burning.

This is my room next to the flames. If it comes to close to something you wet some cloth (preferably somthing heavy like jeans) and then slap the flames in a different direction. Of course if I did this there is probably a 100% chance I would injure myself in some way. Haha.

This is directly behind my room and a view from my window (6 feet away).

Another fire shot.

Do not worry please. I have survived my 2nd and final burning season. Hurray!

Love,
t