First Saturday

What does a typical Saturday in Africa look like? I don’t know! But I can tell you what my Saturday looked like today.

4:30am- I wake up to the sound of the Muslim call to prayer (or maybe it was just someone who got up extra early to practice their trumpet because they really needed the extra practice!). Even though it’s already getting light out and there are people out on the streets being loud, I roll over and go back to sleep.

6:50am- “Co-co-co!” Barb is loudly calling, “knock-knock-knock!” in Songo right outside my window making sure Caitlin and I wake up in time to go harvest rice.

7:00am- I crawl out from under my mosquito net, eat a breakfast consisting of fresh grapefruit and a banana with peanut butter, take my malaria pill, then head off to the widow garden outside of town to harvest rice!

I’ll tell you about the rest of my Saturday with pictures.

The rice field

Women singing a greeting to us

Me harvesting rice with a really sharp knife!

gathering rice bundles

threshing the rice

The land for these gardens was purchased several years ago for the widows to use. Through gardening the women have a way to provide food for their families and make a little money and it also gives them an escape from their painful lives. You would never guess it from all their smiling faces, but many of these women are abused at home, HIV positive, and struggling.

this grandmother comes to the gardens to escape abuse

The directors of PHC discussing building plans

Ok so you have 40 acres of empty land and you want to build a shelter. Where should you build it? On someone else’s empty land really close to your own of course! This sounds ridiculous to Americans but in the Central African Republic I guess this is ok. When the owner of the land you just built on sees that his empty land is being used, that’ll make him happy and he will probably offer to sell you the land (which is what you wanted in the first place). It also increases the value of all the land around where you built. Go figure. This is Africa.

In the picture above, Madam Alexandrine Zokoe and Barb (two women I am working with) are discussing building a chicken coop. They just recently built the shelter you can see behind them and of course it’s not on their land.

little Africans!

The little boys were my favorite! I couldn’t talk to them because I don’t know Songo yet but they loved showing me things. They’d grab a cricket in their hand to show me, overturn a termite hill so I could watch all the little bugs crawl all over, or point out the trails of biting ants so I could avoid stepping on them. They smiled a lot and laughed at me a lot too. The coolest thing they found were a bunch of snake eggs that were just hatching! The little red baby snakes are really poisonous. If you got bit by one you be in extreme pain and be dead within six hours.

A cricket

a hatching snake

dead snake