Painting the rooms! (bedroom) ----------(living room)
Moringa Trees --------------Zucchini
"Knee High" :) ------------Super Protected Green Beans!
The house is coming along, we now have lights in the bedroom which will make putting in my contacts a breeze in the mornings when it’s not quite light out. Two of the three rooms are fully re-painted, including some spiffy white ceilings. We have some patching up to do from the electrical work that was completed yesterday; turns out most of the wall will crumble if you try to puncture a small hole through it. Hopefully when the carpenter and mason come to fix the crumbling front door, the mason will have some extra concrete and a big heart to help us patch up a few spots, either in the walls or the floors. We have a dining room table now that almost fits our chairs under it, the dimensions are off by about 1/8” so, we have to squeeze the plastic chair arms together to wedge it under the table and out of the way (we’re hoping the carpenter will be kind and shave a little off with his plane when he comes by to assist with the door). The kitchen has been left mostly untouched, but will soon succumb to the same burnt peach walls and white ceiling that we’ve painted the other rooms. We’re just trying to figure out patch a large gap between the kitchen ceiling and one wall. Once it’s all sealed, the painting can commence. We’re also planning on having two closet things made (to house clothing) which will go in the bedroom, as well as a couple of nightstands, a coffee table, and a couch to finish up the living room. I also think we’ll add another large bookshelf or two (though I think Peace Corps should pay for this because all of the books on the shelves will be Peace Corps books). All of these additional furniture items may take some time to acquire, but soon we’ll be set up for visitors J. We’ve also purchased enough linoleum/carpet to put in the bedroom over the concrete floors, so soon I’ll have very fake, but real looking wood floors! Kris reversed the latrine door hinges last week, so now the door swings out rather than in, and I have a little more room to… adjust myself. The door still needs some mending though, to make it up to my health watsan standards (light floods the latrine even with the door closed, so flies can unfortunately find their way in and out, though we’ve been really lucky so far with very few flies). The bathing room door fell or shall I say rotted off its hinges the other day, so now that’s just propped open with a rock. You can’t quite see the person bathing from the courtyard wall, so it still maintains a decent level of privacy. Our 65 gallon rain barrel was looking bleak yesterday. Luckily we received yet another round of torrential rain last night. The rain came in such a fashion that it came in through the not quite sealed windows to the southish end of our home. At least now we now know precisely the lowest area of each uneven room. Kris will probably try to fix those leaky windows too.
Kris has been testing out his green thumb with fervor. So far he’s replanted some green beans and more sweet corn in addition to the initial planting when we got here in late August. He’s devised some sort of chicken proofing over the beans, I’m sure we’ll get plenty of Ghanaian interest and commentary related to the newest strange thing we’ve done. Everything with exception of some of the herbs I’ve planted and cantaloupe and watermelon has made a showing through the rocky dirt. The sweet corn is about knee high, and it’s been in the ground 20 days! Amazing! My zucchini is probably doing about second best, and I love zucchini; I hope it bears fruit for us! Sometime soon I will need to prune back the moringa trees and dry the leaves to make into all sorts of useful stuff. I will write a blog entry on moringa once I’m more knowledgeable on the subject. If you’re really curious, here’s some good websites to peruse:
http://www.treesforlife.org/our-work/our-initiatives/moringa
Until next time… Miss you all, love you too!
Here's a link to some additional photos!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031757&id=185900425&l=51b8678127
Go Badgers! ("watching" on ESPNs Gamecast)
