In my grannies' granary

One fascinating thing I ever saw at my grandparents' was a granary; a storehouse for threshed grain. 

In a small village of "Karo'karungi", every end of year or beginning of year was time to harvest grain mainly millet and this was often done once a year. Almost all the chunks of land would have been sowed with millet, a bit of maize, sorghum and beans. As everyone gathered around for Christmas celebrations, this was also part of the plan. The sowing was simple but the harvest extremely tiresome. It was done with short blunt knives smelted specifically for this. After the bountiful harvest, it was sun-dried and later kept in the granary. When the time to consume it was right, it would be drawn from the granary and milled with grinding stones into fine flour. 

The granary is made in such a way that it protects all the content in it from moisture, pests or any other destructive measures. Food kept here was meant to last the family an entire year until the next harvest and it did. The millet was mainly used for millet bread and porridge but along the year, a few other crops would be planted and harvested as supplementary foods. In these homes food was thus always in abundance. In this granary, however small it looked from the outside, was plenty of food collections and in most cases, it would only be tapped into when there were visitors at home.

However today, hindsight is 20/20. If one day we woke up and got to find out that all the food selling points are out of service for just a week, it would be a crisis. Then I wonder, what happened to the granary attitude, have we become too blessed that we take the things around us for granted. But also I have been wondering if banks are the new granaries, and if so, I guess each home should have control of their granaries that is not under the supervision and control of another system, because whoever controls it, then controls you.