In which I spend an afternoon harvesting potatoes, and kill a chicken (my present from the owner of the potatoes!)

So, like I said in the last post, Saturday was both awesome and full.
It started out with an interesting breakfast. I’ve eaten LOTS of chapati here…even some for breakfast. I’ve eaten lots of eggs here, some fried, and for breakfast. So when MammaAlice told me she was going ot make me an egg and chapo, I thought I would get an egg, and she would then heat up the chapo she was holding at the moment. When she handed me the place I saw that I was wrong. There was fried egg stuck to the middle of both sides of the chapo. I guess she put it on top of the egg while it was cooking and then flipped it over? Idunno. I’ve never seen that before, but it tasted good, so no complaints. J

Sooo then I went to the clinic. We never have any patients in the first hour, (it’s too COLD to leave your house unless you HAVE to) so I decided to play with the lab’s microscope, since the lab tech wasn’t there. I took a slide, a toothpick, and scraped some cheek cells out of my mouth and put them on the slide. I let it dry then stained and counterstained it and let it dry again, then stuck it under the microscope, went up to the oil immersion lens which I believe is 125x? I forget. but I saw my cheek cells and it was awesome. Then I tried something that I wasn’t sure would work, but it DID- I stuck my camera up to the lens, zoomed in, and got a picture of my cheek cells. Pretty cool. I showed Naomi and Pastor Jonah but I don’t think they were as impressed with me as I was with myself. :-P

We had maybe 3 patients before I was told that Pastor Simon wanted to take me…somewhere. I didn’t know where it was or what we would do there, nor did I remember the name 4 seconds after Pastor Jonah told me, so I wasn’t particularly excited. So he came and wanted his blood pressure checked, so I did that and then we left. I found out we were going to visit his mom, who is 85 and absolutely adorable and still quite active and he looks juuuust like her.
Before we got to his mom’s house, we went to visit pastor’s farm, about a half hour up HIGHER into the mountains. Somehow, this 27-year-old car has an altimeter, which reads ~2100meters in Limuru but got up to 2500m on the way to the farm. There is a woman named Ann who lives on the farm and is paid to take care of it and run it for pastor. We had lunch at the farm and I took some pictures because it was GORGEOUS up there- SO green, with tiny lakes here and there, puddles and mini-rivers along the road and in all the low spots in the fields…I loved it. In the house was a calendar with 10 different pictures of Obama next to a poster of Obama that said “from Kisumu to the President of the United States of America” with a bunch of pictures of him, one of which was a one dollar bill with HIS FACE on it INSTEAD of George Washington! Blasphemy! :-P So I took some pictures of THAT. The house was made of planks of wood not quite touching each other, going vertically, and tarp on the inside to make the wall continuous. The sleeping room shared a wall with the sitting room but you had to go outside to go from one room to the other, and the kitchen was a few feet away. There was an outhouse sufficiently far away. They have a few hectares of land and grow mostly potatoes, so we took a sack of potatoes with us when we went on our way. The village is called Njabini- which is the Kikuyu word for the sound you make when you squish through wet grass- that’s how much rain they get there. Pastor said it gets the most rain of anywhere in the country, or close to it.

So then we went on our way to the village Pastor’s mom lives in, called Mukiere- which means “one who wakes up early” apparently because the men used to wake up early to go to this place and sleep during the day. Ha! Pastor said, and I’ve noticed it too, that in Kenya, the women do the hard work. It’s common to see men alone or in small groups sitting on the side of the road, lying under a tree, etc. but you never see a woman relaxing. They are always at work in the shamba weeding or planting or harvesting, or if they’re on the side of the road they’re walking carrying some huge burden. I didn’t even really think about it that much until pastor mentioned it, but it’s true.
Anyway. The clutch on the 27-year old car decided to stop working on and off on the last road before his mom’s house and we juuuust made it to the gate to her house/farm when it completely died. We stopped the car and got out to open the gate, then when Pastor tried to drive the car through the gate it wouldn’t go, so we just left it there. We met his mom, who as I have said is adorable and old but active, despite her hard life of being one of two wives to an alcoholic, and raising 7 children (the other wife had 8) At some point we wandered outside, I made friends with a calf who licked my hand but didn’t step on my toe this time. I saw a cow with a ring through its nose for the first time in my life. Which was cool. :-P We wandered around to the mom’s shamba…the whole place was just GORGEOUS. Scattered houses among the hills and mountains and GREEN and MOUNTAINS and gorgeous GREEN and MOUNTAINS. So the mom is a potato farmer also, apparently. Pastor went off to try and fix the car, his mom went to get digging rakes and buckets, so pastors wife and I went into the shamba and she taught me how to find and dig out the potatoes. I thought we were going to take out only enough to make a dinner but soon realized we were actually going to harvest them. So we spent the afternoon digging for potatoes. It was AWESOME fun. There were not enough digging rakes for everyone so I used my hands. The soil was moist and heavy and rich and DARK and it was SO much fun just hanging out on my hands and knees pulling out giant chunks of weeds and then potato plants, then digging with my bare hands and finding potatoes, its like a treasure hunt. Everyone should spend at least one afternoon of their life digging for potatoes with their hands. I apparently impressed people with my potato diggings abilities because every time I dumped a couple handfuls into the pile they looked up and looked at me and said “Gai” (I have known for a while it’s an exclamation for surprise or anything you want it to be, but I just learned it’s Kikuyu for “God”. So of course I’ve picked it up, but now I decided to stop saying it, but I need something to replace it with in order to do that successfully….still trying)
So we did that. Then pastor came back and said it was time for us to go, the car was all better. So we went and washed the giant amount of dirt off ourselves, and then we went over to the chicken pen and a girl caught a chicken and then pastor’s wife told me it was for ME! I’ve never owned a chicken before. So that was pretty cool. :-P It got its legs tied up and I was told to eat it tonight, so it went into the trunk and we took it home. Of course the car decided to break down a couple more times on the way home but we managed. :-P
When we got home, I was excited to tell everyone about my chicken. They took a roster from the pen here, and both were eaten for dinner. I requested, and was granted, to kill my chicken and pluck its feathers. So after watching one of the boys slaughter the rooster, I did the same to my chicken. I’ve never directly taken the life of anything larger than a bug before, so it was a momentous occasion in my life. :-P So the chicken was laid on the ground and I stepped on its feet like I was shown, then the other foot goes on the wings, then you hold the head with your left hand (I didn’t want to hold its head. I made the boy who was showing me how do that) and then you just slice the neck with your right hand. They don’t have a lot of blood, they’re small. But they TWITCH for a LONG TIME even after you take the whole head off and THAT was just strange. :-P So then we put it in hot water and pulled off all the feathers. We brought the two inside and the boys gutted them and disarticulated them into the edible parts. I was told whoever slaughters it has to eat the stomach but vehemently declined the “honor”…all the innards went to Dennis, who is apparently the only one who likes them. I have a video of him eating intestines, then cracking the skull open with his teeth and eating the brain. Blech.
Anyway. So the meat went into the pot and just boiled for way too long. It was nice to have meat but chicken doesn’t taste all that good when it’s overcooked, but I was eating a chicken that was MINE and I KILLED so that was pretty awesome.

Then I went to bed.

Sunday had some cool things happen too but this is getting too long so I will add them to a post on Monday or Tuesday.
I always do this to myself, and wind up having TOO MUCH to write at once. Weekends are always an adventure around here!