Washing Dishes

The other day I came upon one of my young neighbours, Aluet, washing dishes. Since the Dinka don't have sinks, they wash their dishes in basins. They often put them out in the sun to dry.

Aluet is holding a stick that is used to stir porridge and other things while cooking them. It has a short piece of wood attached perpendicularly at the end of the stick (which she is holding), and this is placed in the pot. 

The Front of My House

Here's what the front of my house looks like these days. It looks a little different than it did in early 2012 when I first posted a picture of it here. My front door is now painted a nice blue, and I have a gutter to catch rain water from the front part of my roof and a cistern to collect the water. It's nice to have this water for washing clothes, various kinds of cleaning, and watering plants.

I have some vinca rosea (also known as periwinkle) plants in a bed next to my front door. They thrive this time of year with all the rain.

I also have quite a lot of aloe plants (which you can just make out on the centre left in the house picture above). The gel inside the leaves is very helpful for treating burns. The aloe also loves the rain and has been multiplying like crazy. New little plants sprout up from the roots of existing plants. In April I transplanted quite a few small plants out of this bed and gave some away, but now it's overcrowded again.

The aloe is in the midst of a flowering blitz. The long stems shoot up from the centre of the plant and the flowers form at the top of the stem. Each individual flower sticks out horizontally at first, then droops down, opens up, changes colour and then falls off.

Harvest Scenes

Women in Parot, the village where I live, are in the midst of harvesting and drying sorghum, sesame, groundnuts and okra. Here are a few shots I took today near my home.

Tall sorghum plants, with uprooted groundnut (peanut) plants drying on the ground, 

and sesame stalks drying on a stand.

Colourful sorghum stalks and cut-up okra drying on the ground.

The home of one of my neighbours, a very industrious older lady. You can see sesame stalks drying on the roof of her hut (blue tarp, centre left side of photo) as well as on a stand (centre right side of photo) .

Some of my friend's grandchildren and neighbours with sesame pods drying in the forefront and sorghum heads drying behind them. 

No harvesting in this photo, these amaranth plants are not yet ripe, but I love their bright red flowers--and the kids who come running when they see me with my camera and love to ham it up. :-)

Dung Beetle

We have many interesting bugs on our compound. Many of my teammates, particularly the younger ones, but also some older ones like me, enjoy finding new or unusual specimens and sharing them with each other.

Zakari and Amina came by recently to show me a very impressive dung beetle they had discovered. These creatures are pretty amazing. According to Wikipedia, dung beetles feed partly or exclusively on dung or feces. They possess exceptional dung disposal capacity and one dung beetle can bury dung that is 250 times heavier than itself in one night.

Many dung beetles roll dung into round balls, which are used as a food source or brooding chambers. Other dung beetles bury the dung wherever they find it. A third group neither roll nor bury the dung: they simply live in it.

We currently have two cows on our compound to "mow" the grass, so there is lots of dung available.

House Building Part 3: Roof Frame

The next step in the house building process, (my previous posts are here and here) is putting up the roof frame. The picture above shows what a completed roof frame looks like. Here are some of the steps to get there.

The roof frame is always done by men. The first step in a typical frame is putting posts in the ground all around the base of the walls. These posts will support the base of the roof frame.

These posts are thick branches cut so that there is a "v" shape at the top of them and their length allows them to be put about a foot into the ground. A hole is dug for each post and then filled with earth that is then packed down firmly.

This picture shows the walls and base supports for a large hut which will be used as a stable.

After the supports are up, a bundle of thin branches is tied together and placed in the "v" on top of the supports. The base of the roof frame will rest on this ring of branches.

The amount of branches used for this can be pretty impressive. Below is a close up of the support ring for the stable.

Next, comes the actual roof frame. Men do a lot of the work for this standing on a temporary platform that they've built in the centre of the hut. First they install the roof support poles.

Some of the supplies for this step:

Next, bundles of thin branches are tied in rows onto the support poles using strips of palm leaves.

I find it really interesting how the palm leaf strips are made. Experts were doing this right at the site.

Here's a video showing how they do it.

And here's another video showing how these strips are used to tie branches onto the roof support poles.

Thank You Gift

The other day one of my neighbours came by with a gift: homegrown local cucumbers. She is the mom of a girl I helped for several months by treating a sore she had on her leg.

These local cucumbers look somewhat different from the North American version, and they have a lot of rind and not as much flesh. They're pretty good peeled with some vinaigrette. However, my teammate Laurie recently served me some cut up and fried in olive oil with with garlic and salt. They were really tender and tasted almost like zucchini--really delicious! Quite a culinary discovery and something new to add to our cooking repertoire here. :-)

My teammates and I often receive gifts during the growing season as our neighbours share with us the fruit of their labours, sometimes to thank us for help we've give them, sometimes simply as a token of friendship and appreciation.  So touching.

I'm Back

As many of you readers know, I was away from South Sudan the past few months visiting friends, family and supporting partners in Canada and the U.S. I got back to the village yesterday and plan to get back to more regular blogging now. I flew up from Juba, the capital of SS, to the capital town of our state, which is about 33 km south of where I live (but takes over an hour to drive because the roads are in pretty bad shape), on the plane shown above, a refurbished Russian plane flown by a local company. It takes an hour and 40 minutes to fly up here from Juba.

Waiting for luggage to arrive

The three-wheeled vehicles in the forefront are the local taxis. There are always a lot of them gathered when the plane comes in, hoping to have clients to take into town a few km away.