Hazy Days

The Harmattan haze is pretty intense today. Its as if its a super foggy day but instead of fog is dustiness.

So I still havent been doing too much, just preparing to make a moringa nursery so that I can distribute moringa trees to everyone. I will teach them how them can add it to their stews and soups for nutritional benefits. The moringa leaves have a lot of vitamins, including protein and calcium. We are re-weeding my overgrown farm area and will fence it and everything so soon I can have an awesome garden. Very few people in my village have home gardens. They all buy tomatoes twice a week at the market so I am also going to try to encourage them to plant some tomatoes at their houses. Even though they are farmers they still buy a lot of things at market that they could grow at home. Its kind of silly but maybe there is a reason they aren't growing at home. I will find out soon. I tried to explain it to my friend Amoja (the guy who cuts down trees) and he couldnt grasp the concept of just growing tomatoes for home consumption. He insisted that if you were going to grow some tomatoes that you would have to grow more so that you could sell some at the market. My neighbor Wafa understood when I was talking to him about it though.

So there is an abundance of peanut butter here. They call it groundnut paste. The only thing I have seen people use it for is in cooking groundnut soup. Groundnut soup is my favorite soup here. It is quite delicious when made with chicken as the meat instead of fish. I think I've mastered it by now. The ingredients are meat, water, garlic, onion, tomato paste, groundnut paste, salt, something they call kip which is like a little flavoring cube, and chilli powder. So I recently bought a big jar of groundnut paste to eat with my apples, on toast, and to make pb&js. Little did I know that some of the market vendors put chilli powder in the groundnut paste because the only recipe that they use it in is the soup. I became abruptly aware of this when I made my first pb&j. So now I am trying to make groundnut soup as much as possible until I finish the jar and can refill it. Most of the time the groundnut paste is separated into little baggies for 30 pesewas. I bought 4.50 cedis of the spicy kind. Mistake noted. 

I have dedicated a little bit of my time to making my room a little bit nicer. All of my stuff used to be all over the floor. I almost didnt care because if I went one year with my stuff all over the floor why not do two? I am very happy about the improvements though. Having a clean room makes life more pleasant. The carpenter built me a nice shelf and I made myself a nice makeshift closet. While I was hammering everything I hit my thumb with the hammer which was not cool. I also broke my mirror that day. Luckily I am not superstitious. I broke my mirror because termites were eating the wooden frame around it, and I could literally hear them chewing at night. There would be big piles of sawdust around my mirror every day, so I decided to remove the mirror from the frame and just put it on the shelf like that. Well as I was trying to get it out I was apparently not careful enough. 

Last random thing that happened to me this week:
A girl selling beauty products on her head walking through my village laughed when she saw that I was wearing finger nail polish. She said "Hahaha! A white person wearing finger nail polish!" Like it was ridiculous. I have no idea where that came from.