Food and Water

coco-yams

We definitely do not take food and water for granted here.  With "outside" groceries being difficult to bring in because of the road, we have been trying to get hold of more local food, but even that has proven to be a challenge.  However, this last market day (remember that "market" is 3 km away; I'm glad we have a helper to do this shopping for us!) Johannes brought back the usual njamanjama greens, as well as a great find of good coco-yams and plantains.  Our youngest especially enjoys coco-yams, and we all enjoy plantains!

This photo shows greens (like spinach) which will be used for njamanjama.  They are usually bought still attached to the plant, so this shows the leaves after being plucked off; they will be cut up and parboiled, then the liquid squeezed out before the greens go in our freezer!


 It's probably no surprise to hear that we need to filter our water before drinking it (filtering is not a luxury here - it is a necessity!).  But we really appreciate the fact that we have running water in our house, when most of the village still carries water in buckets from public taps that service 10-20 houses each.  Of course we paid to have pipes laid for that, but still!  The village system goes through a big cachement building to settle out a lot of the silt (from the river) before getting piped into the village, and almost every year there is a time when this building gets cleaned out.  Well, that day was yesterday.  At least we got warned by one of our friends, so we gathered water in preparation.  Mike loaned out our shovel and we paid the obligatory donation (<$10).

As you can see from the picture of the water in the buckets, the tap water has been quite dirty.  Rainwater is in the left bucket (yup, we put buckets out when it rains - after allowing time for the rain to clean off the roof first!) and tap water in the right bucket - ugh!  Water from these buckets is put into our water filter - if we have rainwater, it can go straight in, but tap water often has to settle for a couple hours before we can use the top portion.