My life in a ground nut shell

Here is a picture of Peace Corps for you. Myself, freshly bathed and wearing my relative nice clothes, a backpack full of teacher training manuals, a little plastic bag filled with example teaching aids made of rocks and cardboard tied to my backpack strap, flip charts under my arm, and a chicken in each hand, taking the short cut to school through the dried ravine to have a workshop for community school teachers. The chicken did poop on me. The training went ok.

Mrs. Zulu recently told me to come over and sit. "Don't sit alone. You think too much"

True True Mrs. Zulu. But sometimes when you feel you can't communicate your thoughts and emotions, and sometimes when you feel someone is angry or offended about some action of yours but you don't speak enough nyanja to figure out what the offense was, or if there even was one, and don't speak enough nyanja to explain the misunderstanding anyway, then that feels kind of terrible and at those times it feels more lonely to sit with people than to sit alone...

"Thank you Mrs. Zulu. I'll come"

I do love the Zulus. Mrs. Zulu feeds me eggs when I come over to eat because she knows i like them. One day I sat with Mrs. Zulu and helped her husk (is that the right word?) some dried corn. She had to show me how to do it properly. And then I sliced both thumbs open somehow. They thought that was funny. So soft.

My roof was patched recently. This consisted of one or two workers on the roof and another four or five sitting around drinking village beer. It was fun. Now I have a funny fat little roof on my storage shed too. Well we will see if the patch thatching fixed the leak. Not the first time it rains, not the second, but the third time. THEN we will know. When the grass is sleeping.
If it didn't then I have an enormous blue tarp sent by my father which will hopefully span the width of my house. I believe it will.

I put in concrete steps between my house and kitchen Nsaka to keep my feet out of the mud when it rains. Putting down concrete is a lot of work.

This mud hut is really the first place I feel a sense of ownership of. Hmm. Next project is an oven to make delicious breads and cakes.

Groundnuts are peanuts. I eat them a lot. The Zulus groundnuts are the best because they are from Eastern and know how to grow them well. Apparently to grow a goundnut you just stick it in the ground. Not sure why I didn't know that would work...