15 August 2008

The Long Awaited (2nd to) Last Post About Zambia

Hello Hardcore Readers!

I am finally going to start the end of this blog. I don't remember exactly where I left off and I don't want to copy Carrie's blog. Well, the chicks, numbering 6 kept growing strong. Every day, several times a day, New Chicken marches them inside the house to discover if Carrie or I forgot to close up Finnigan's dried fishes or left other food within reach. Every time we toss them out, but they never learn. Our newest chicken, Corncob, ate all of our strawberry plants (tons of runners we had just set out). She and the others also ate all of our ultra-composted-sunken-bed seedlings, despite my efforts to built an elevated cover of criss-crossed sticks. It had been growing spectacularly. The rest of the garden, save 2 tomato plants is decimated too. It's mostly since we let the elements and termites punch holes in our garden fence. Our previous gardening "successes" didn't encourage us enough to patch it up.

In my last month in the village we built a stand-up showering shelter out of poles and elephant grass. It's great. A person up to 6 feet tall can now comfortably shower with minimal wind to freeze them (which still means a significant amount). It's shaped like a square spiral so you can't see in and wind can't figure out how to navigate to its core.

We also basically finished the fence/patio. There is still one roof section that needs a bit of thatching, but I think it's ok. The chickens all love to gather in the shaded corner and preen and sit with eachother. It's pretty cute. We got to sit in it ourselves a little bit, but since it was cold season, it wasn't as often as we would have liked. Whenever we would sit in our hammocks Finnigan would get upset that we weren't cuddling him and would scribble-scrabble up the poles and sit on us. Sometimes he would get tired of Carrie and jump from her hammock onto me (sometimes resulting in claw-marks on my arm).

I should have written about everything sooner, as I now forget a bunch. OH! Speaking of bunches - we harvested our banana tree before going to Tanzania and Zanzibar. It was a huge bunch of bananas, since we cut the extraneous stalks to direct all the energy into this fruiting one. Heavy too. Well, we hung them in our hut, during cold season, so they didn't ripen up before I left :( Carrie said they ended up being not that great. I imagine that was cause of the cold, slow ripening. The neighbors said to hang them in our insaka (cooking shelter), but since that's just open, I would guess that the neighbors and others would help themselves to our bananas.

Oh. I remembered that I left my list of everything I wanted to write about in Pittsburgh. I'm in Madison, WI visiting my friend Sarah right now. Oh well. I'll save the rest for when I get back to da burgh. It's better to blog in little chunks anyway I think. Expect a bigger post in the 2nd week of September or thereabouts. Take care all.

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