Wednesday Walk Around
There have been many improvements in the Malinyi district. For instance, the village of Lugala (right behind Tumaini and right outside Malinyi town) just had a main road (dirt) added to it in the last year, and Campus Road (right outside Tumaini) just had electricity come to it one month ago! Tumaini just had electricity added to its campus one year ago! Before that they ran a generator for about 3 hours a day. As you can see from the pictures, their “kitchen,” where they prepare the food is a covered, open air building with three wood burning furnaces with pots. Cows, and chickens (meals) roam the property, and they butcher them themselves. Actually, they don’t eat much meat or protein. Rice, potatoes, other kinds of plants and roots, ripe bananas that they cook is a staple, and other vegetables that I don’t eat (I don’t eat anything green. I know. I know… They asked me why? I said, “because I’m a bad man! At least that’s what my mother an wife say.”) I watched sweet Skiwa (17 years old) cut a chicken’s neck, put boiling water over it and pluck it. They couldn’t believe I had never plucked a chicken, or seen a chicken plucked! They couldn’t believe we go to a store and it’s all ready for you & you never see the animal. Life is hard here. I don’t know if they see it that way – it’s just life. But the conveniences, ease, comforts, luxuries, technologies, sanities, machinery, etc. makes life so much easier where we live. I don’t know that it’s all better, but certainly easier. There is far less distractions here, so people, community, relationships, depending on one another and bearing one another’s burdens seem more essential to survival and become necessary. All the more humbling that someone departs with their chicken to bless a visitor, or provides hot water for a shower, or gives a new shirt as a gift. I have been so blessed by these people, impressed by them, and grateful for their hospitality and friendship.
You will see in some of the pictures homes (huts) made of bamboo frame work and mud filling with grass roofs. You will see some homes made of brick. Some with plaster over bricks. Those are the three levels of quality of homes. Most, on the main roads have brick homes with tin roofs. Though you see many huts interspersed with them. Rarely do you see plaster on homes. Even more rare do you see a fence around a home (that would be really wealthy). Off the main roads are predominantly huts. Mud, thatched roof houses last for a year or two before they need to be re-mudded. Often you will see them in the front or back of a brick house. What you don’t see are homeless people (though in the big cities you do. That’s because people who find themselves without a home will build a hut on the property of a relative – that’s why you’ll see huts in front of brick houses. Or if there isn’t enough room in the house for everyone they’ll build a hut for a kid to move out. Like I said before, very few have cars. Some have motorcycles (small ones) that they may keep in their small house, but most have bicycles and/or walk. So a driver shares the dust filled roads with cars, trucks/buses, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, cows, and sometimes monkeys.
I wanted to include a video of Skiwa preparing the chicken but there is no Wi-Fi at the school and my cell coverage isn’t strong enough to download the video.
