Its winter here and although you wouldn't expect a place this close to the equator to get even a little chilly, because of our altitude (1400m) we do tend to get our fair share of crisp mornings and lately some windy, pretty miserable days. So I find myself with my second head cold in about a month, chilly toes (Ok, my own fault, I am a very reluctant shoe wearer but I promise that as soon as I finish writing this I will put on socks and boots. Just for you mum) and a hot water bottle stuffed under my cardy while I hunch over the computer in my almost grumpy mood.
Grrr...I really hate being sick. I don't get sick much at home, I can only reassure myself that my seemingly frail, sickly body must be actually be successfully fighting off hundreds, no, thousands of African superbugs, parasites, diseases.....maybe?
We've had some pretty interesting ones lately, I got some strange rashy, tingly thing which may have been a spider bite or may have been the result of some dubious washing powder, who can say? Kelsey got the dreaded... the much talked about but rarely seen... toe worms - yep that's right, little worms that burrow into your feet to lay their egg sacks. Gross. But strangely fascinating. Kelsey definitely got some street cred for those.
Brenda got what really must've been a spider bite as her foot swelled up and she got a welt with a flamey (? Really, it looked hot-rod-esque, only it was a dark maroon colour) bruise, Barry has a festering wound on his leg that took him to the hospital today and tonight he went a funny grey colour as he described the razor blade/tweezers/antiseptic session that ensued, none-the-less it sounds like the nurse did a pretty thorough job of sorting it out and he is now on a course of antibiotics (Pole sana Barry, none of us likes taking those things). So, sickies all round, and that's not even counting all the little things we volunteers get like diarrhoea, nausea, food poisoning, cheap-wine induced night terrors, headaches, or, after one particularly good Saturday night out, all of the above.
Anyhow I have been trying to use my sick time wisely, writing new fact sheets for our enviro pages on food forests (One of my favorite topics) and swales, and doing up companion-planting charts in Kiswahili and English for the farm office. Yep garden nerd, that's me. The farm is really coming into it's own these days we are getting fabo vegies from our vegie gardens and the first three of our still-young banana palms have fruit forming. Our food forest is settling in and already from this area we are harvesting sweet potatoes and fodder for the cows and goats in the form of indigenous napier grass, planted on swales between nitrogen fixing leaucaenas. The avocado frees and mangoes are covered in new growth and passion fruit vines are sending up long tendrils looking for their next upward spot to twine. Anton and I made an arbour in the vegie garden for our passion fruit vines over the path and already it is nearly covered. Mudi refers to it as Eves house of passion; in Kiswahili the fruit part is dropped and it is just called passion, which is an unfortunate second language thing! (He knows better though, just being cheeky as usual)
So, its now several hours later, we have just had our weekly team meeting and I am newly adorned with a beanie, scarf, two jumpers, jeans thick socks and boots and the evening wind is bitter. None-the-less I am bravely heading out into the night air with the others to the good old Engo Sheraton where chipsi-mayai (Chips in an omelet) awaits. Mmmm....
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