6 - Trader Households

Summary

NONA, TRADER IN LAKE-FISH

Nona lives with her family in a bamboo house in Tounelet, the northernmost desa of Kakas. She is thirty-eight, her husband Roni forty-eight, and their three boys are fourteen, twelve, and ten years of age. All the children attend school regularly. They are members of the Baptist Church.

Nona and Roni were both born in Tounelet. After they had been married for fourteen years, Roni, like his father and his grandfather, worked as a fisherman on Lake Tondano. He sold the fish he caught to local female fish traders who visited the market-places in Langoan and Kakas. Roni never took any fish to the market himself, as fish trading is still regarded as a job for the women.

Until one year ago, Nona did all the necessary work in the house and garden, while Roni did the fishing. Then things changed when, with the death of Nona's father, they inherited three-quarters of a hectare of land, with about 100 clove trees. About half of these clove trees were expected to be ready for harvest this year (1983) for the first time. The whole family was looking forward to the first harvest from their own field, and often talked about the clove price they would get and about the weather, as everybody knew that the previous year's long drought had killed many clove trees in the region.

Their three-quarter hectare of land is not exclusively reserved for cloves, although this is the main crop. Besides cloves, they grow various crops for household consumption, such as vegetables, bananas, papayas, lemons, beans, tomatoes, spices, and some maize. They also use the garden (approximately 700 sq. metres) around the house in Tounelet for growing subsistence crops. Here they keep seven chickens, which is difficult without having any chicken-run or fowl-house. When one chicken disappeared, Roni suspected it might have been stolen.

Two years ago, Roni started working in another clove field in the mountains. This one-hectare field is owned by a relative living in Manado, a former army officer, who bought the land upon his retirement.