One more update

I'm not sure what happened to cut off the right margin of the previous post, but my apologies for making you work that hard to figure out what it said.  I thought I'd take advantage of one more day of internet before we head back up to Livingstonia tomorrow.  

Another question I've been asked by quite a few people is "what is a typical day like there?"  And the answer is that there is no typical day.  What we can predict is that it will be unpredictable, but let me take a stab at a description.  

Monday through Friday, our cook/housekeeper and our gardener/helper come around 8am and we sleep surprisingly late most days, but are always up and fed by the time they get there.  The local people without running water start gathering water from our outdoor faucetaround 5am and the local rooster starts crowing about the same time.  By 6am you can hear the kids playing on their way to school which I think starts at 7am.

  

If it's been raining, which it has most of the time lately, and we have electricity, we work at our dining room table/desk or the wicker furniture which is our sitting room furniture.  I try to avoid going out for meetings, which we also do regularly, until it has dried out some as the roads can be slippery and thick with mud but that's not always possible.  All day long we see a stream of people going up and down the path behind our house which leads down to the floor of the valley and lots of homes.  Women and children are carrying water, wood, food and any number of other things on their heads and travel steadily all day and night on that path.  I would guess that the elevation they must climb is 500 to 800 feet, on slippery when wet mud, and often barefooted.  The homes are without water or electricity in the valley.

We also have a stream of people cutting through our yard, as personal space is a different concept here.  Along with that is a stream of chickens, and the local dogs, one of which has adopted our porch as his napping place.  Often we have people coming to the door during the day - women selling produce, or the butcher telling us he will slaughter a cow this week wondering if we need meat.  People we work with will stop by to chat and work, and we sometimes have them join us for lunch, which Smelton cooks each day - we have our large meal at lunch usually and then we cook our own dinner.  After dinner, and dishes(heating water on the stove to do dishes), we play cribbage or another game or chat.  Occasionally dinner or visiting with neighbors.

I try to get out and walk even if it's raining softly as the main road in front of us is packed hard enough not to be too muddy.  All in all, a pretty quiet life.  I'm attaching one more picture from our walk to the source last weekend.