Marlin's Ag Update

(This is a portion of a letter from Marlin Rice, the Cornerstoner God has raised up to develop the agriculture side of the Hope Center. Marlin is in Serenje for two weeks checking on and expanding the ag project.)

I was up at 4:30 this morning. Every morning about this time there is a group of military-style joggers that run down the road calling out a cadence. Then on the return trip into town someone with a whistle blows loudly for every fourth count. It's really quite obnoxious, especially before 5:00 in the morning.

Work starts at the Hope Children's Center at 7:00 every morning. We ride a truck to the site and there are 45-50 workers waiting for their orders for the day. Zack has some laying concrete blocks, mixing cement, digging trenches for the septic system, leveling trusses, hoeing weeds, moving soil, etc. Sunday and I spent the morning with a tape measuring off fields to plant seedling musangu trees. These are the trees that don't leaf out until the dry season, so they don't compete with the maize and beans for sunlight and moisture, then during the beginning of the rainy season, they shed their leaves, producing a shower of nitrogen-rich leaves for the surrounding crops. We also identified some more of the ground that we are having hoed where Sunday will plant vegetables.

Right before lunch today, Joshua, one of the farm laborers killed a gopher while he was hoeing the peanut field. He brought it to show to me, then gave it to his wife. They have a little brick shack on the farm where they live with their four children. His wife took the gopher, laid it on the open wood fire, singed the hair and scrapped it off with a knife, then continued to cook it on the fire. Then she gutted it, put the intestines in a bowl (notice she did not throw them away), split the ribcage with a knife, and then boiled it. If you haven't figured by now, they were going to eat it. She had also made some enshima (boiled white corn meal). She asked if I wanted to eat with them. I said I could eat the enshima, but I wasn't too sure about the gopher—we don't eat gopher in America. Fortunately, it was high noon and I had to run and catch Zack's truck back to the office. No gopher for lunch today!