More Adventures with Animals and Cooking!

As is often the case, a lot of our news end up revolving around animals and cooking! Most of you probably know now about the bee episode (Amisadai wrote about that on her blog). That involved a fair amount of traumatic excitement with the pigs and the dogs ... and Amisadai! The next trauma was while we were away in Magozi. A rabbit happily gave birth to six little bunnies which we have been eagerly anticipating. Unfortunately that night, one of our dogs broke into the hutch and ate the mummy, so the next day, the six bunnies were dead as well. But our animal woes are small compared to the animal action in the village where they face crocodiles whenever they go to collect water or catch fish in the river. Or as happened this week not far from Magozi, four aggressive elephants came through, completely destroying three shambas (crop fields). As well as the danger of these big animals near the village, at harvest time now, that is really bad news for those three families. So a few dead bunnies and traumatised pigs pales in comparison.

Getting the pigs back in their banda after the bees!

We were back in Magozi for three days this week with Rachel and Auntie Ann. We did some more gardening, checking on the trees, planting more seeds and helping the tomatoes along. We checked on the work of the stoves group, who are now back to making stoves after the harvest and have about eighteen made and about twenty fired and ready to sell at the agricultural fair next week. Rachel, the girls and I got mucky with some creative clay work. We all walked rather too far in the heat to visit the Masaii, but were warmly welcomed! And we had a good meeting with the "leaders" group in the evening. Working through Joshua, we were talking about leadership through his example.

Carrying the "kuni"

Louisa managed to create the first minor trauma .... the first day we were in Magozi, we went to the little vegetable stand to buy a few tomatoes and onions to cook a sauce to eat with our ugali. I then got the fire going in the jiko and proceeded to cook the sauce which went into a pot to keep warm and then the ugali. Louisa then picked up the pot of sauce (which had a broken lid) to carry inside to eat, but the hot sauce spilled out and then as she dropped it, poured down her! I ran to her shrieks, and stripped her top off and poured our precious drinking water down her tummy. She was fine, just a little red and very shocked! But the worst of it was all the sauce in the dirt. For those of you who have eaten ugali, it is not so easy to eat without a sauce! And there in Magozi, I couldn't just quickly heat up something else. I had been cooking for over an hour and that was all the tomatoes! After that, we kept Louisa away from carrying food. And while we there, cousin Rachel also perfected her jiko cooking skills!

Tim teaching at the Kilolo Conference

The day before we went to Magozi, we were in Kilolo with Andrew. We were doing a day of teaching for the Pastors and Evangelists Conference. Tim taught on Leadership, I did a cooking demonstration teaching on healthy and efficient cooking, and Andrew taught on Mission and Development. It was a long day, late to start and lunch not until almost 5pm! And it was cold! We were shivering in the morning with our fleeces on! But it was a good day, and Rachel was a great help assisting on the jiko! Amisadai helped as well with showing the pictures and holding paper plates for healthy meals. Louisa on the other hand was a case, and ended up curling up under the flipchart board in the middle of the demonstration!

Louisa dozes while Rachel teaches!