This Little Piggy Went to Market

A moth the size of a small bird is flying around the house right now, and it sounds like there is a dinosaur outside, but it is actually Chase, who ate something that didn’t agree with him, and it is coming back up as I write. Too much information, I know…sorry…TIA. He is green as the curtains in our living room (think pale lime sherbet). I’m not too worried yet, but I will become so if it lasts too long. Thank God we have connections at the local hospital (yes, the one with no running water or electricity, but I hope they will give us some Cipro if we need it.)

Lots of good things happened today. The weather was really, really nice. We had eggs for breakfast. The electricity has been on all day. We got a poly tank, and Lake Victoria water to start growing algae for our fish farm. Fred is back guarding our house (we are partial, trying not to be, but we are). Here’s an interesting side note about Fred, the guard. He is a very nice young man of 28 (I really CANNOT believe I am calling 28 young, like he’s my son or something, after all, he’s just a bit younger than me-ha!…but I digress). So Hayden is outside talking with Fred, and Fred asks Hayden if we have the moon and the sun in America—he seriously didn’t know whether or not we did. He also tells Hayden that he has heard of the ocean, but never seen it. For some reason, this just hit me as so unbelievable, I really hadn’t thought about it. When the best form of transportation hoped for is a bicycle, of course he has never seen the ocean. But to think that he’s never been educated in a formal sense to know about the moon and the sun and the stars…wow. And we complain if we don’t like the modality our children’s teachers are teaching in, or we think there should be more/less homework, tests, papers, etc. Cherish education, please!

Some very interesting things happened today as well. I went to the market. Not the supermarket (think 7-11 without the name brands, and no Slurpees...), not the little specialized stores that are all around, but the local market, where you feel like you are going underground, like a bunch of ants, scurrying around and carrying out whatever you see that you want. I don’t think I can find the words to adequately describe to you the market, but I wish I could. We went to an electrical store to ask where the plumbing store was, the man went out on the street, called a friend of his to watch his store, and said “Follow me.” We were literally running to keep up, going about three blocks, and all of a sudden, we were at the market. I’ve been wanting to go to the market with Anife, but haven’t yet, and maybe it is a good thing. It is little shanty shacks, probably at least 1,000 of them, stacked right next to each other, with uneven dirt and pavement, and it gets dark because a lot of it has a roof over it, and it is like a maze, not laid out orderly, but dark, noisy, and teaming with people, sights and smells…oh the smells! In the cracks and crevices, there is sewage water running freely through. There are shacks and shacks of vegetables, fruits, meat…yes…every possible part of a cow is hung up (with no refrigeration) to be purchased and cooked. The smell of raw meat is overwhelming…I can still smell it. When we got home tonight, Anife had cooked mincemeat…I couldn’t help but wonder what parts of the cow she had purchased and minced up for us to eat, I really tried hard not to think about it too long…and I ate a lot potatoes tonight! As we wound our way through the maze of the market, we passed tool shacks, shoe shacks, clothing shacks, food shacks, pot shacks, machete shacks, dishes shacks, mops and broom shacks, clothing shacks, scrap metal shacks, and finally, a plumbing shack. There we were dropped off by the electrical store owner, at his friends’ plumbing shack. This man was able to put together just what we needed, in no time at all, and then rush us to a tool shack, where his friend hooked us up with the tools needed to complete the job (the job being a hose bib at the bottom of the poly tank to release waste water in the fish tank). The market is so full of life, sights, smells, textures…I wish you all could have been there with me to experience it, it’s better than the movies!

We intended to put the hose bib on the stove and heat it really hot, and then melt it through the poly tank (kind of a MacGyver move if you ask me…remember that old TV show?), but we have become side-tracked with work related emails, and sick stomachs…we will insert the hot hose bib into the poly tank tomorrow. I can happily report that algae from the lake is growing in our back yard even as we speak (an essential we have learned in the proper feeding of tilapia). The electricity has decided to go to bed for the night, so I think that I will follow its lead. Please continue to pray for direction on the coffee house, a location at this point, is just not happening. It is in God’s hands. Say a prayer for Chase as well, he is suffering tonight.

Ciao,

Cheri