February 17, 2008
Mice, Ants, and Chickens


Dear friends,

Happy President's Day, everyone! I'm in town for a few days meeting with various officials, learning about wells and rabbits and of course doing the obligatory brownie and bread baking.

Life at site has been fairly quiet. Mr. Bushy Tail, the mouse that I found climbing up my mosquito net one night, has passed on to the Great Mud Hut in the Sky. I was discussing his rambunctious nighttime forays into my house with Ba Reuben and Reuben had an instant solution- he directed his brother-in-law to make two snares from the nylon mesh of a sack, and then installed them in two likely places in my house! This meant I spent a few nights with a hammer and a frying pan strategically placed in my house (along with my ever present stick-for-poking-things) hoping I would catch the mouse but really really not wanting to have to kill him. He kept coming in and avoiding the snares, preferring instead to wander amongst my Tupperware while I shined my headlamp around trying to find him. Usually I noticed him by the large fluffball that was his tail, sticking out from between the plastic tubs and cans of tuna. Eventually his curiousity sent him to my poisoned peanut butter, and while I miss his little paws and Mickey Mouse ears, it's delightful to get to sleep all night!

I've been attacked by ants an unfortunate number of times in the last month. Africa, being Africa, has a wide variety of different sizes and shapes of ants, the majority of which seem to enjoy biting me. Usually I notice them marching in long columns across my path and leap over them (Brows also elegantly leaps across streams of ants, or takes lengthy detours into the bush to avoid them). Once in a while, though, I'm distracted and my first sign that I'm near a bunch of ants eager to sink their teeth/pincers/mandibles/whatever pointy things ants have is that they have already starting gnawing on me. While hitching a ride into town last week I found an ant biting my leg, and as I pulled it off and tried to drop it out the car window it latched on to my finger tip. Only in Africa!

Gretchen and I were fortunate enough to hitch a ride in with some hydrologists doing a survey for UNICEF. This meant we got to sit in a rather nice pickup truck as they drove around trying to remember where they'd stopped the previous day so they could collect water samples. I realized that I'm getting to know my catchment area pretty well- I see familiar trees and know the bends in the road and the children of different villages, where before I was just faced with a blur of mud huts and overhanging branches.

I've started working with some lead farmers to improve the way they're keeping chickens. At this point I'm still trying to gauge how serious they will be but I think a few simple changes could increase the number of chickens they have and the number of chicks that survive- which would mean more food for the families! My chicken program isn't anything too complicated- the main points are "Give your chickens water to drink" and "Don't let the young chicks wander out into the bush where you KNOW they'll get eaten by snakes and hawks." We'll see how it goes.

I was able to satisfy my forestry-geek side by planting a woodlot of Leucaena leucocephala with members of the Tree Nursery. I'm really excited that that actually came to pass, and I'm hoping other people will come to see the benefit of planting trees for firewood and other uses instead of going further and further each year to get firewood.

Another fun afternoon was spent celebrating Sumner's First Birthday with Ba Reuben and his family. I brought over the ingredients for banana bread and made it with the entire family watching- the kids were a little surprised by the way all the ingredients mixed together and then after hours on a fire, became cake! It was a lot of fun and tasted pretty good. The whole family seemed to enjoy the celebration. The banana bread went fast- when we'd all finished I looked up and noticed that Beattie, the 2 year old, still had a fistful she hadn't eaten yet. Shortly thereafter her sisters noticed also and the last I saw of Sumner's birthday cake, it was clutched in Beattie's fist as she raced across the yard trying to protect her remaining morsels.

I hope you're all enjoying yourselves and having fun adventures and wonderfully quiet moments. As always, thank you for your thoughts, prayers, and mail!

Nan

January 17, 2008
The night bus doesn't seem so bad...

...when compared to the night ferry!

Good morning from Lusaka! I'm here for just a day, seeing the medical officers and my program director (who I'm currently THRILLED with because he somehow obtained cashew seeds for my tree nursery). Gretchen and I came down on the night bus. Only in Africa do you find fleas and cockroaches on the bus, although at least they're quiet. My last night in my hut I was visited by a mouse with a bush tail- I can't remember the bemba name but it looks like a baby squirrel, or like a mouse with a squirrel's tail. I didn't mind him when he was climbing around on my shelving unit... I was a bit more perturbed when it crawled up my mosquito net right next to my face! Plus he made a very high squeaking noise the whole time!

The night ferry was a ridiculous mode of transportation. There's a few overnight ferries that run between Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam. To get an extra day in Nungwi, the most beautiful beach I've ever seen, we opted to take the night ferry back. Sadly, in our inexperience we chose the night ferry that's also a shipping boat, and got to sit on a loading dock for four hours before boarding the shipper and sleeping on park benches. An inauspicious end to an amazingly wonderful vacation. Fresh seafood, awe-inspiringly white beaches and turquoise ocean- delightful. Anyone want to come visit? I'll take you to Zanzibar!

Anyway, I spent about a week back in my village before having to come back out. During that week, I was immensely excited to see no less than 5 fields in which members of my tree nursery had planted a nitrogen fixing tree we grew in the nursery. The tree is native to Zambia- munganunshi in Bemba, (Fadherbia albida in Latin). Most of the other agroforestry species the nursery has grown members have planted near their houses. That works to make the random new tree more visible to others, but there's less of a benefit to improving the soil somewhere where there's no farming being done. Thus, I was incredibly thrilled to see that people had taken the next step and planted trees IN THEIR FIELDS.

So when I return I'll do more visiting of people's fields (stuff is growing, and my suburban heart is very excited by the way seeds turn into plants that turn into food) and hopefully buy some rabbits. Some of my neighbors started building me a rabbit hutch last week!

Sorry this isn't very newsy... I didn't sleep much on the bus. But at least there's electricity here!!

Nan