Manual Labour

Well, after our pleasant Easter weekend, it was time to get down to business. Not the kind of business you may come across at your 9-5. Rather, ploughing a corn field. This isn't a technical job or mentally stimulating but that might contribute to why it was so difficult. Our responsibilities were to weed around the maize plants. Easy enough. BUT there was some mystery weed that looks like every other weed, that they actually boil and eat. Everybody else had no problem differentiating this mystery plant from the other weeds, except for us two whiteys. Every minute you could hear one of us, is this okay? Plough right? Bad one right? They must have thought we had never been in a garden before. This was day 1. We understood our task, and knew that there was a lot more ahead of us.  On day 2, we came prepared by purchasing four hoes, to assist in our hard labour. We also had the help of two young men, which was a HUGE contribution to our speed and ability.

Every person that walks by gets a real kick out of the two mzungu's (white person) doing hard labour. One of the most common words here is pole (pronounced polay), which means "I'm sorry". It's polite to say 'pole' when someone is doing anything that might look difficult (difficult refers to walking, working, balancing a heavy object on your head, sweating in the sun, etc). We collected a lot of poles during our ploughing days.
After three days we had finished the maize field and it was time to focus on the vegetable garden.  Day 4 brought a new and exciting adventure for us!

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