Have I mentioned lately that it is beautiful here?! I’m sure I haven’t mentioned it enough! Today, Heather and I journeyed around to the 12 houses of the new goat beneficiaries, which meant journeying through lots of corn fields and wheat fields and barley fields and sorghum fields….and I LOVED it! The weather was magnificent today – warm, with a cool breeze, which is pretty typical around here unless it is chilly rainy season (which we are currently on the tail end of). We were checking to make sure each of the ladies had built the pen for their goats and built it properly before we distribute goats on Friday. Although we told them last week that we would be coming and that it would be strictly business (i.e. no time to sit and have coffee at each house) because we were trying to make it to all 12 houses, in all 12 houses today the ladies immediately started bringing chairs up when we arrived and insisted that we stay and have coffee. We did not. It was humorous to see how little what we had said mattered. Their culture is to be hospitable and to welcome guests and that is what they intended to do! I was glad to have our farm manager with us, who is a national, to be able to resist the insistent requests….I probably would have caved and we would have been there all day. I’m such a pushover.
Sorghum
Corn
Teff (grain)
And of course, the kids who were following us.
In other agrarian news, Heather and I finally gave up on any hope of receiving eggs from our hens. Ever since we got back from Kenya, there have been no eggs so the former laying hens will now be laying in a frying pan. I tried round two of plucking and butchering chickens and this time I did my homework and read up on the process. The removal of the innards of chicken #1 was quite the nauseating experience, but by the time I made it to chicken #3, I was feeling a bit like a pro. Yet, when my chickens were all clean, inside and out, and I set them on the counter they hardly looked like the picture on the blog I was using for a reference. Not sure if it was the chickens themselves, the cutting instruments, or the person doing the cutting(that would be me) but the finished chickens were hardly photo-worthy. I sure hope they are fry-worthy…that’s really all I care about anyway. Heather has been clamoring for a pet, and since we denied her the right to an African puppy (rabies anyone?), baby donkey, and baby goat, I thought maybe some baby chickens would suffice. So, we will soon be on to round 2 of our egg production endeavor – that is, after the baby chicks get big enough to lay of course. Hope they don’t hear what happened to the ones before them, or maybe I do, perhaps it will scare an egg or two out of them.