Showers of blessing

It poured this evening, about 60mm of rain in about 1 and a half hours, which compared to the average rainfall of 50mm in the whole of May in Edinburgh, shows you the intensity of it here. The rainfall has an annoying tendancy to interrupt cable TV beamed from South Africa, which meant that I had to stop watching Man U v Sunderland in the local hang-out. In the time it took me to run home, I was soaked to the skin already. The storms also often affects the electricity, so off that went as well while we were making dinner. It makes for a nice romantic dinner by candle-light, though… Rain here is called 'baraka' which means blessing. I wonder if that idea will ever take off in the UK.
There has been rain everyday for the last week or so which is great for my garden which is looking particularly lush – we have started harvesting greens – kale (eaten all the time here), amaranth and cowpea leaves are ready to be thrown into the pot. We are waiting for the maize, sorghum, beans, coriander and other veggies and herbs to be ready. We also have some tasty fruits like cantaloupe beginning to flower, so I am excited about that juicy thought. Getting involved practically with planting your own food is the only way to actually start to get to grips with understanding what so many people in East Africa rely on for their sole income and food source. I have also been trialling seeds from ECHO (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organisation) whom I studied with in November and December last year, to see if there are any plant varieties that can produce a bigger and better crop.

How does your garden grow?

Before all the rain today, we went round to our local vegetable lady’s house to visit her family. She had invited Emma and I round after Emma had given her a banana cake she had made. It is so nice to be invited to local peoples’ houses. Her name is Polly and the only trip her husband has ever made on a plane was to Aberdeen, strangely enough, where he was involved in a teacher-exchange programme. Polly works extremely hard to make ends meet, visiting the wholesale market at 6am to buy her wares, then sitting at her stand till 8pm, 6 days a week.

Polly's kids: Bianca, Chelsea (the dad's favourite team...) and Fidel Castro (seriously)

Emma wanted me to blog that she is getting on well with her school resources that she is making out of local materials and scrap. She finished her abacus this week from bottle tops, which looks great, though she has a long list of various useful teaching aids to produce in the next few months. She particularly likes her husband’s help in such technical areas as sawing straight or hitting nails in without bending them.

Emma and Becky make blackboards

Bottle-top Abacus with model

We have struggled a bit to find a church that doesn’t burst our eardrums when the preacher points and shouts down the microphone at everyone. The church we made it to last week made Em burst into tears with the noise! There seems to be a lot of emphasis on prosperity teaching as well – the idea that things are going to get better and better for you and your business as long as you have enough faith.

Driving around in matatus continues to add excitement to our lives, with a near miss head-on collision with a tractor… Everyone was heckling the driver after that and I think some people rightly refused to pay.

Another highlight of this week was failing our Luo test for having learned the wrong information. We studied numbers – and now know numbers up to 100,000, but there is a bit of discrepancy as to what 1 million is in Luo… In case you are curious, achiel is 1, ariyo is 2, adek is 3, angwen is 4 and abich is 5 (make sure you say this one right…). For the test, we both were stumped when it came to remembering what cooking stick was (oluodh kuon).

Oh, and I am now the proud owner of some Obama underpants bought at the side of the road. Barack Obama’s heritage is from around these parts and you can also buy Obama bubblegum with his face on it and t-shirts as well as find schools and gates named after this most famous of Luos.

Obama is pants