The bread will rise and the chicken will fall

This picture may be hard to see in all its darkness but Scott is diligently cleaning a chicken he just killed with a dull knife. The pace of life changes so significantly when you live in the Mbua without electricity, refrigerator and Walmart. Every day was filled with mundane tasks like washing the clothes by brush and a pail of water that had been carried up from the river which had to be heated on a wood stove by wood that had been cut up in the jungle and lugged down by very strong Nduga men. The chicken had to be killed, cleaned and boiled for a long time...these are tough chickens and really skinny. I attempted to make bread there with my new found ability and though the bread turned out fine...making sure the oven wasn't too warm or to cold. Of course, we had to clean the oven out because that is the best place to dry the wet wood that had been carried down from the mountain by the strong Nduga men...

Because it rains all the time, washing and cutting and cleaning etc had to be done in the morning early...We also liked to eat our big meal at noon so the cooking also had to start pretty early. All in all, if we had stuck to sweet potatoes and greens like the rest of the village, we may have had more time for other things. :)

There wasn't any refrigeration which meant we ate what we fixed and had no left overs. We cooked a pig one day and saved it for the next...unfortunately for Scott this did not agree with his stomach and he proceeded to be quite sick until he could expel all the offending hog from his system. This process took about 12 hours, not a pretty sight, sound or smell.

I remember getting upset with Nick about his muddy clothes...one morning he had fallen down 3 times and everything he had on was muddy. Because I had just finished scrubbing clothes all morning, I did not see his falling down as a normal occurrence because of muddy and slippery ground, I saw his falling down as an extra hour of washing the next time it decided to be sunny. Needless to say his explanation of the circumstances around his slipping was falling on deaf ears... I was just calculating how much it scrubbing it would take to get the mud out.

We had a great time, maybe just because we had never had to work so hard for what we have always taken for granted. The skinny chicken tasted good with the warm bread by the fireplace amongst the drying clothes rushed in and hung because the rain had started to fall.