Who's in your yard?

I thought you might enjoy seeing some of our African backyard wildlife. Here are two of our visitors. Our Rottweiler, Ellie, drew our attention to both of these guys. We only saw the chameleon once, but had some fun watching him change colors and separately move his eyeballs simultaneously in all directions. The monitor lizard, who is about 3 feet plus the tail, comes around all the time and drives Ellie nuts.

We've also had the occasional monkey, hedgehog, rabbit, and a regular band of banded mongeese who keep the snakes away. Plus scorpions, gorgeous butterflies, and icky slugs and bugs. The strangest thing was finding a fish in our grass when Lake Victoria is about a mile away! How did it get there? Dropped by our permanent hawks who occasionally let half a snack slip their talons. So although we don't see giraffes, elephants, and rhinos wandering around every day, we do get some pretty fun animals to remind us that we're not in America.

kuni (firewood)

You might remember seeing Tessa carrying her dolly on her back the same way Rose, our househelper, carries Jack. Well, here's the most recent development on raising our little African-Americans. Rose came out to gather firewood with her daughter and neighbor, which they use for cooking between 3 rocks holding the pot. Tessa watched as I took photos to show all you great folks at home who buy neat bundles of firewood at the local grocery store and toss them in an SUV for cozy evenings by the fireplace. (and wouldn't I love to join you on a chilly evening?)

Anyway, the next thing I know Tessa's doing a bit of her own gathering, and by the look on her face, she's still trying to figure out how they do it. Me too! It's amazing to see huge buckets of water, benches, or trays of fish or fruit all balanced on someone's head! Then again, I've actually seen one lady with just a bar of soap on her head - now I think even I could manage that one. My favorite is seeing someone with a roller suitcase on the head - isn't that what the wheels are for?!

Boga-lantern

Tessa and her buddy Micaiah learned the fine art of pumpkin carving on Halloween. We don't have orange pumpkins though, so we used a regular green one but Micaiah's mama painted hers orange! The girls had a great time watching and participating and even Jack got in on the action. In Swahili, pumpkin is "boga," and Tessa came up with two terms for a jack-o-lantern: boga-lantern and jacko-boga. Pretty cool, eh? She's good with Swanglish or maybe just confused by her brother's oft-used name.

One odd thing was that I actually felt guilty for wasting a pumpkin, which I would ordinarily use for cooking pumpkin bread, soup, muffins, and baby food. I never would have felt guilty making a jack-o-lantern in the States! But I never would have used anything but canned pumpkin either. Also, after a few days, it grew mold and fruit flies - ugh. Never saw that in the States either.

All in all, it was a lot of fun and got some funny looks from our African friends.