We had spent 4 days doing things that stretched us.

We had walked into planting beds and crouched over our individual rows, each of us pressing seedlings into the earth with our bare hands, learning the depth and the angle and the feel of getting it right after getting it wrong.

We had sat in our learning sessions under the open farm shed, every face turned forward with the kind of attention that only comes when the week has already made you hungry to understand and we had absorbed knowledge that landed differently because we had already felt it with our bodies before anyone tried to explain it with words.

We had cooked for each other every single evening, taking turns in the kitchen, stirring large pots over the stove, and prepping ingredients side by side at the counter, feeding each other the way families do.

4 full days of all of that.

4 days of shared work, shared meals, and shared soil, and a growing, quiet, unspoken closeness that none of us had fully named yet.

And then Day 5 came...

The Bonfire session

We started the session with a chair game.

Eight men step forward. 7 chairs were arranged in a circle, one fewer than the number of players, and everyone who understood what was about to happen leaned in because this was no longer a gentle evening around a fire.

Now, we are talking about grown men who had spent all week being professional and composed suddenly reduced to watching each other, waiting for the music to stop.

The first round went quickly.

The music played, eight staff members moved around those chairs with varying degrees of confidence and strategy, and when it stopped, one person was left standing with nowhere to sit and the crowd around the fire absolutely lost their minds with laughter.

A chair was removed.

Seven men remained. Then six. Then five. Then four. Then three.

As we see more people eliminated, tension climbed and the noise around the fire climbed with it.

We realized that every elimination has its own small drama.

You know, the split-second misjudgement and the look on a person's face in the exact moment they realised the chair was gone.

You can see that the MD(Mr. Korede) was in disbelief.

The fun took him somewhere and he forgot, just for one crucial second, that the music was going to stop.

And when it did, the disbelief on his face was so pure and so genuine that the whole circle felt it before he had even fully processed what had just happened.

Staff showcase their talent

I didn't know we had talented singers among us. Like genuinely talented.

We don't know that this talented staff has been sitting quietly behind a desk, underneath a job title, waiting for a night exactly like this one to finally come out.

It was mind-blowing seeing some staff this talented without knowing they were.

You stop seeing them as just the person who sits across the office or stands beside you in the planting row.

You see the whole person, the version of them that exists outside of work and responsibility.

We clapped after every song. We called for more.

We sang along when we knew the words and hummed along when we didn't, because the feeling was too good to sit outside of.

The Prepared Barbeque

We had taken turns at the grill, each person stepping forward when it was their moment, laying the fish over the heat with care, watching it, and turning it.

We didn't ask anyone to and nobody kept score of whose turn it was.

We just moved around that grill the way we had moved around the kitchen all week.

And when it was ready, we reached for it with our bare hands.

And we had some staff going back for more.

Long after the fish was finished, nobody was willing to be the first to say it was time to leave because leaving felt like the wrong answer to everything the evening had been asking.

The night was fun and a memorable one for Agrolocale staff and management.