finally. some. photos.

hey dudes!
I finally got my camera to work. I'll let the pictures tell the story.


This is my family. Minus the girl on the left and the guy second from the right. Pearson is in the middle, Monica is holding Thomas and Edina is sitting on the far right, grumpy as usual.


Monica and Thomas. Monica is always laughing like this. Thomas, at 3 weeks, still looks fresh out of the womb. Maybe by the time I leave, he’ll start looking less like an alien and more like a human.


Monica joking around with Pearson in the morning.


Edina. Argh. Edina. She gives me this stink eye every time I look at her. She can be laughing and then she sees me and her face quickly changes to this. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve this. I even bring her biscuits when I feel like it.


Annettie and Monica. I like this picture because Annettie is losing her mind laughing. I don’t know if I’ve told you about her smile yet, but man! it makes me so happy when she laughs.


I was following Thomas around yesterday because he looked so cute in his bear suit. He gives bear hugs.


This is me with Thomas strapped on my back. Babies don’t wear diapers around here so this was one of the few times he didn’t pee all over me. I limit my holding time to less than 10 minutes to reduce my chances of getting peed on.



The girls next door. Left, Middle, Right: Jesse, Lenesia and Penina. Lene is my bestie. She runs up to me every time I come home and walks around saying my name all the time. She sits on my knee most days when I come home for lunch and loves being tickled. Jesse is about 13 years old and has taught me that pre-teens are the same all over the world. Penina is super sweet, well behaved and quiet. This family is basically an extension of my family. The girls walk into the eating room all the time and join us for meals and they give us groundnuts whenever we need them.


Dennis! He wins cutest kid in the world award. He recently got pink eye (Edina had it for weeks!) so he doesn’t look so cute here, but he is a real gem. I took a whole bunch of photos of him before noticing he was holding a dead mouse in his hand and then finally he held it up proudly with this face on. Eating mice is very common here and some people make a living off of catching, boiling and drying them around the village. The fat ones sell for K30 each = 22 cents. Yesterday he was carrying around baby mice in his pocket. I want to start a save the mice campaign around here.


This is Manuele. He has the goofiest smile I’ve ever seen. He is a great kid- pretty shy, well behaved and very helpful. I met him a couple days after I moved to Biscopi Village and we husked maize together. Him and his buddy Olibe sang songs while we raced to husk maize the fastest. He might be my favourite neighbourhood kid because he doesn’t get up in my face or bug me to play tickle tag; he just sits with me and visits.


These are the village chicks. I bet you they’ll all grow up and be besties. Probably build their houses side by side. It amazes me how much they look like their moms in this photo. Edina is the one in the jacket, suckin’ on a lollipop and lookin’ upset.


I made nsima for Annettie yesterday and this is what it looked like. I’m pretty embarrassed about it, but she ate it and said it was good. Sometimes the smoke gets so out of hand that your eyes water and you can’t see the pot anymore. This looks more like Pala than Nsima. I like to tell myself I could make it if we weren’t cooking in a smokehouse.

more photos to come in the future.
love kate!