Farmer for a day

I slept in late, and hung around the house reading one of Amanda’s books all morning. Amanda and I had a relatively early lunch, and then walked to Kyenda town. We first went to visit Emma’s orphanage. School was out and all the kids were on holiday, but some of the boys who were living at the orphanage and the girls living with us were at the orphanage. They were helping Emma and Nuliat dry the corn that Emma had harvested the day before. Amanda and I went to join them. We were basically sitting on an enormous pile of corn, and picking up corn from around us, throwing it away from us, so as to spread them out in the sun. It was quite fun actually, as long as you took care not to hit anyone, or get hit yourself, with flying corn.

After we had spread the corn fully around the orphanage grounds, Amanda and I went to the Kyenda clinic to use our computers. Amanda had worked at this clinic during her first week in Kyenda, before transferring over to work at Mubende Regional Referral Hospital due to a lack of anything for her to do at Kyenda clinic. The clinic had solar panels built in, and ran on solar power – they needed the electricity to run their refrigerators, where they stored the vaccines. So we happily plugged in our laptops and started our IT activities. After a while, we got a call from Emma asking us to return to the orphanage. Apparently, the person with the decobbing machine had no-showed, and Emma wanted us to help pack up the corn. So we went back, and with the help of all the children at the orphanage, we packed up most of the corn. As we were working on the final sack of corn, the decobbing machine arrived in all its glory on a boda boda. The owner of the machine however had yet to come. So we proceeded to empty all the sacks of corn we had worked so hard to pack up back onto the floor of the orphanage. The decobber guy finally arrived. It took him a while to set up the machine, and start the generator that ran it.

Finally, with a cough and a splutter, the decobbing machine suddenly roared to life. A flurry of activity ensued. We rushed to fill our pails with corn, and emptied them into the machine, and then rushed back to fill our pails with more corn. We had to hurry, and get all the corn decobbed before the fuel ran out. Once in a while, the decobber guy would stop his decobbing machine, and we would rush to get the kernels out from under the machine, and go through the cobs to see if any of them still had a significant amount of kernels on them. If so, we would throw them back to the pile of corn waiting to go through the giant jaws of the decobbing machine; if not, we would throw them in the other direction, where all the naked cobs lay in a haphazard pile. By the end of the whole process, we were all exhausted, sitting amongst the cobs with bits of corn in our hair, on our clothes, underneath our fingernails. I was very happy that I had not gone with agriculture as my profession of choice.

I was ready to go home, but Amanda was craving mangoes. So we decided to walk to Emma’s garden to go get some. Unbeknownst to me, the garden was really far away from the orphanage. We trekked along dirt paths, tripped over fallen trees and shrubs, detoured around gigantic ant hills (more like ant mountains is what I’d call them), and finally arrived at the garden. We picked some mangoes, and then made the equally long and windy return journey home. These mangoes had better be the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted! I was about to collapse when we finally reached home. We took turns showering, and then had a sumptuous feast for dinner – rice, irish potatoes, cassava, beans, and of course, mangoes for dessert! We were all so hungry, we finished everything that Nuliat had prepared! And the mangoes were indeed delicious, but I’m in no hurry to go back to the garden to get more.