"Cold Season"

Happy Thanksgiving! I just got back into town after spending Thanksgiving with some other volunteers. We actually managed to make a complete thanksgiving dinner, with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, fruit salad, even pumpkin pie! It was amazing. We bought 2 turkeys (alive) cut their necks (facing mecca, of course), took out feathers and organs, and cooked 'em up. And to think that I was once a vegetarian!




But it's back to work tomorrow. It's "cold season" which means there's a lot of work going on. By cold I mean sometimes it gets down to the 70's, at night. Yet people in my village are starting to walk around in hats and puffy coats!
Now is the time of year when everyone is harvesting crops, and here that consists mostly of millet. I've gone out to the fields a few times to help, but mostly I've been constructing structures to store the grain (cereal banks, I guess), made out of mud. They have a really neat method of stacking interlocking wet mud bricks into circular forms with a single window. It's pretty fast, and with 3 people you can get one up in about two days.





I'm also getting chickens next week to raise for the eggs (and for a steady source of protien)! So between the garden, the (free range) chickens, the lack of electricity, and riding my bike everywhere, my carbon impact is probably the lowest it's ever been. (Minus the bit of petrol I use in my lantern.) All the farming here is done without machines, too; it's picked by hand, carried on heads, and then transported by donkey cart.






That's pretty much the update. I feel like I've just about settled in, although there are still plenty of random events (like having a picnic in the middle of a millet field, gathered around a single bowl scooping up handfulls of toh and snot sauce) to remind me that, oh yeah, I'm in Africa...