Everywhere we go all the people that see Luke and I flash the biggest smiles, wave and shout Mzunga (it means "white man who travels").
Today we slept in and "paid our sleep debt" as our family here says, ate some brunch and departed with David our team member on the ground here.
We started by going into town and starting to get our supplies around and coordinating for a woman to come to the bush with us to help us prepare meals.
We then took a drive out to the bush so that David could show us around the area and we could become more familiar with the people and culture here in this region.
We ended up at a mountain where there was an abandoned quarry from when they built the new highway. We climbed the mountain and talked to many of the people working with the rock in the quarry. They were taking large rocks and breaking them down by pounding them with hammers by hand to various sizes; excruciating work in the hot sun. When we asked David about the market for these stones he told us that they sell them by the truckload and get the following amount of money depending on the size of the rocks. For basketball size rocks it costs 100,000 pence ($10usd), for baseball size stones it costs 150,000 pence ($15usd) and for stones that have been crushed by hand down to pea gravel size it costs only 180,000 pence ($18usd). It takes the average family about 4 weeks of working 10 hrs per day to crush enough stone to fill one truck. That boils down to less than $.20 per day per family for hot gruelling work in the sun. Worse yet is that most of the men stay at home while they send their wives to do this work with the children. Many of the women were carrying babies less then 1 year old on their back while they crushed the stone and carried it from the quarry in buckets on their heads. I asked how much they could carry that way especially with a child on their back and David quickly answered "at least 100kg".
As we walked down from the mountain in a somber mood we said hello to all the people working and i was amazed to see them all laughing and smiling when we said hello. Even when faced with such horrible working conditions in order to feed their families they were still very joyous and in no way hopeless. The also got quite a chuckle from watching Luke and I climb and descend the mountain...David said they were laughing at us becuase they were comparing us to the only other animals that climb the rocks "the goats".
We left once we got down and went to look at some crop fields to gather a sense of what is going to work best in our garden in Kapelebyong. After our day today we are even more excited to get to Kapelebyong and teach the villagers a useful skill so that they can make good wages and earn a good living for their families.
Love love love the updates! Keep 'em coming!!!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Laura! SO cool to hear from you guys and see what you're doing every day :) Can't wait to see pictures from KP...
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