A day in the life of...

I spent today with Joyce Omollo and her family. I asked to spend a day with a woman in the Luanda community doing whatever she does in a normal day. Both Joyce and her husband, Churchill, are teachers at Nyasumbi Primary school so most of the weekly chores must be done on the weekend. The family attends church on Saturday, leaving Sunday for washing clothes, harvesting crops from the shamba (family farm plot), shopping, and fetching water for the coming week.

I met up with Joyce at 6 am, before sunrise, and we went straight to milk one of the family’s three cows. I wasn’t very good at it! We took the milk back to the kitchen, a separate mud walled building from the main house, to cook tea and uji (porridge made from millet) for the family’s breakfast. Joyce and Churchill have three sons, Jean Paulson, Onyx, and Shaule, aged 2, 8, and 9, and also take care of their 8 year old niece Anna. Like most families in Luanda she cooks with firewood placed in a depression built into the earthen floor of the kitchen. At first the room filled with smoke, but eventually the small chimney in the wall helped us out.

After eating breakfast in the main house, the two older sons tied 4 twenty liter jerry cans to a donkey to go fetch water at the lake. The walk would take them about 40 minutes each way and they’d been told to make two trips that morning. The 160 liters they collected would be used for washing dishes, cooking, bathing for 2-3 days. Joyce and I put the week’s laundry into plastic buckets and basins which we stacked on our heads to walk to the water pipe up the hill. About 15 minutes walk from their house is a broken water pipe from a well built by a private landowner. The well and tank have fallen into disrepair and now women in the surrounding area come to use the water that seeps out of the broken pipe to wash clothes and dishes. The community no longer drinks the water because it was found to be staining their teeth brown (which often happens with high fluoride groundwater). Joyce gets drinking water by putting buckets outside when it rains or by buying jerry cans of water from a different well in the dry season. We waited our turn to fill our buckets from the broken pipe. I got lots of surprised stares, greetings, and laughs from the other women, especially when I carried a bucket on my head. After washing and rising the clothes near the pipe we carried them back home to dry on the thorn bushes.

By about 10:00 we were ready to head to the shamba. Anna, Joyce and I took knives and buckets to the field of maize and sorghum a few minutes walk from the house. We filled buckets with maize cobs and sorghum grain and made several trips back and forth to empty them in the granary. Churchill joined us in the field when he returned from a meeting in town. At around 1:00 pm Joyce and I cooked a lunch of ugali (maize meal boiled in water until reaching a thick breadlike consistency) and fried oro (small sardine like fish caught in the lake) with tomatoes and onions. The boys were hungry from their trips down to the lake. Other children from neighboring households joined us for the meal.

Most of the afternoon was spent sitting in the shade of the house separating the maize kernels from the cobs by hand, a job that left me with a big fat blister on my right thumb. After a few days of drying, the grain would be taken to town to be milled into flour to make ugali. Anna collected more firewood and helped us sort out the stones and sticks from the beans and rice to be cooked for dinner. Once the beans were on the fire, we collected and folded the clothes, ironed some using a metal iron filled with hot coals from the kitchen, and brought the five goats back from the field where they’d been tied to graze. After a bucket bath in the bathing shed and bathing the little one, it was time to cook dinner. Just before dinner, Joyce showed me how to catch the chickens and toss them under their big sleeping basket for the night. There was much sqwauking involved. At 7 pm the family gathered in the main house for a tasty meal of beans and rice by the light of a kerosene lamp.
-Julia