Tuesday, January 10, 2012

John's weekends

How I was spending weekends before school started back up: (School reopened today - 01.10.2012)
Two weekends ago:

It was a house day.  I made Chapattis (wheat flour tortillas) from scratch for the first time.  The Peace Corp put together a cookbook for the country that includes recipes that can be made from local ingredients.  I enjoyed a cup of coffee and listened to Django Reinhardt during the process, so I could not ask for a better morning.  When I walked out the front door a beautiful breeze was blowing and the temperature was pleasant also.

Other things on the agenda for the day: sweeping and mopping up the house (as you can image sand is always on the floor and gritty toes make housework seem like a good idea), sewing up a torn bag, making screens out of mosquito netting so we can leave the windows open at night, a little shopping, and some reading.  Tracy had lunch plans with a local lady that works at the grocery store too.

I cooked up the bread and it turned out pretty well for a first attempt.  We must have been hungry because we ate about a loaf between the two of us.  It is weird to spend 3 hours cooking and cleaning up to realize everything was for 15 to 20 minutes worth of eating.  We had a little bit of cheese so I made a cheese sandwich.  It was delicious.

Then we walked around and introduced ourselves to some neighbors.  It is considered polite (and expected) to just walk into someone’s yard and start a conversation.  I still don’t have the hang of it yet and some people only talk Setswana so it was good practice once I worked up the nerve.

Then there was this weekend:
Lots of animal incidents occurred.  We had chickens entering the house, donkeys braying outside our bedroom window, cows in the yard, and a scorpion in the house.  We had a hard rain and I think it drove the scorpion indoors.  I also heard a local bird whose song sounded like a dialup modem.  That or someone here has a dialup modem…

We played lots of board games and cards to stay entertained and then came the best entertainment of all.  I let Tracy cut my hair.  She used clippers for the whole thing and she did a great job.  It is a great way to reduce the heat and keeps the sweating down also.  I was a little worried, but now see we will save a fortune on haircuts when we return.

We have been having a lot of water outages and got lucky enough this weekend to collect water for washing up our clothes.  We got laundry done and filled up our reserve water buckets to make it until we have water again.

I love and miss you all,
John O.











3 comments:

  1. The haircut does look cool and refreshing!

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  2. Reading about your adventures is surreal. Oh, yeah, Tracy DID do a good job. I think you should hire her! :-)

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  3. It has been amazingly refreshing and I think she has the job full time from now on!

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