Fruit, Steve’s Hair, Learning Luganda and More

Over the past few weeks I have seen lots of fruits and vegetables that I have never seen before. In addition, to showing us these new items Hudson and Francis always buy us one of them and then show us how to prepare it. I think that the most interesting fruit has been the Jackfruit. This watermelon sized spikey fruit grows on trees. Inside it is yellow and it tastes sort of like fake banana (aka not that good no one likes the yellow banana flavored candies). In addition to learning how to prepare fruits we don’t know, we have learned to slaughter, pluck, and dress a chicken!! So I was standing outside waiting to start stacking bricks and Hudson called me over to him. He was standing next to a tree that I had never go over to before. I got over there just in time to see Francis kill a chicken, let its blood drain and tie off its neck with a banana leaf. Then Hudson made me help him pluck the feathers off the body (it was still warm). Some of the feathers roots wouldn’t come out and I had to pull them out by hand it was sort of gross. After that he showed us how to dress the chicken and pointed out all of its parts. I was quite impressed. All I could think about was how different this was to those plastic Perdue packages of chicken you get at Price Chopper.

So Steve’s hair grows really fast and he asked me to cut it. Bad idea. I tired to cut it, but it’s really thick and the electric razor died after thirty minutes, so instead of having long hair Steve had to comb in the morning, he had some short patches and some long patches. I felt really bad, but I didn’t know how to cut it. So then he tried to cut it himself. That actually worked out really well. But he missed a couple patches and having OCD he just had to try and cut them. That is when things got messy. He forgot to set the razor to 5 mm and left it on 1 mm. He then preceded to shave off an entire patch on the back of his head J. He does this while I’m in my room reading, so when I leave the volunteer house I hear a quite and desperate “Becky, I need your help?” coming from behind the house. I could not stop laughing. In the end we went to the barber, who did a much better job then either of us could have done and cost less than a dollar.

Every Sunday we visit John’s father. John’s father is approaching 69. His house is about a half mile down the road that Engeye is on. Every week we go there and sends Francis out to buy Steve three beers and a small bottle of Star Gin (40% alcohol) and this great tasting cherry soda called Mirinda (product of the Pepsi Cola Co.) for me. Last week when we arrived, some of his extended family was there. They were discussing a family problem, so we had to go wait outside until they were done. This made me very happy because they put the one and a half year old baby outside to play in the road while they talked. She was getting fussy because they wouldn’t let her play with the table cloth. And yes they did just plop her right down in the middle of the road in front of the house all by herself. Then I got to go play with her!!

Learning Luganda has been quite a challenge. However, we made a huge break through the other day, we learned how to say and conjugate verbs in the present progressive. This has speed up our learning process. Although, I am hoping that when John gets back he will do nightly Luganda lessons with us. I also learn a lot from the kids themselves and from hanging out with the kids. Because they do not speak English I have to express myself in Luganda and therefore have to learn Luganda when I am around them.

The kids are awesome. As most of you know I love little kids, no I love all kids and I gravitate toward them. Therefore I have completely enjoyed having an entourage of five kids under 10 years old come play with me for about an hour or two every morning or afternoon. They are all such good kids. There is Peter(6), Fiezo (6), Axom (Fiezo’s brother 3), Oliva (8), Wasua (7), and Shamirra (8, who is often has her four month old baby sister tied to her back with a piece of cloth). Shamirria is a little mom and she is awesome at taking care of babies. Axom is just out of it. He often stands to the side and eats his shirt or fingers while he vacantly watches the others play. He also has a consistent stream of snot coming out of his nose. They all love to help us work, especially when we use the wheelbarrows. They help us push the wheelbarrows, by leaning on them and moving forward. Then once we dump whatever we are wheeling they make us wheel them back to where we are doing the work. Axom loves this so much that when he gets a ride he holds onto the sides, sticks out his tongue like a dog, and spreads his legs and puts them in the air. Steve has taught the kids how to say “What’s up? … Not much?” and now whenever we see them the greet us with a friendly “What’s up?”.