Hail

Monday, February 25, 2019

We only have one more month left to enjoy Arusha. These next weeks will pass quickly and I still have many things I want to accomplished. There’s no particular place I want to go, but I do want to get some more fabric transformed into a dress or two if I can find what I want. Ray’s mother gave us a whole ktenge cloth, but it’s not particularly patterned to make a good design for a dress. Still, having a big black star on my stomach and butt might be strangely alluring. We’ll see.

My morning passed slowly with email and blogging. John is reading and evaluating a manuscript for a publisher who wants to know if John thinks the book is worth publishing. It’s always something with John!  I decided I had better read the passages in Acts my homies want to discuss at our next meeting this Thursday. I’m always worried that I will scandalize them, but so far they’ve been enthusiastic about my flights of exegesis.  Then, I tried to respond to an email that was forwarded to me by a friend. The email’s author said I had made several mistakes in my blog on the World Vegetable Center. I am always glad to get corrections, especially on names, so I tried to make the proper corrections in that posting. By the time I finished with that, the morning was over.

We made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. We are still enjoying the cheese I packed with us from Spokane. We could never afford to buy it here. Next year, I plan to pack some parmesan cheese with us, too. We still have some of the ketchup, mustard, and peanut butter I brought along this year. It seems odd to bring peanut butter to Africa, but the local product is very oily and often tastes stale to me.

As usual, we had laundry to do. I got it started in our big red bucket, and then John took over and did the three rinses and all the wringing between them. I wish we could find a mechanical wringer of some sort to make this all a bit easier. Today was the first time that I wished I had a washer and dryer here.

Just before 3:00, there was loud thunder and soon it began to rain. That’s not unusual, but then it began to hail—really hard. I had never seen such big hailstones in Africa. They were amazing and bounced all over, even through the open door to our apartment. This went on for perhaps 15 minutes, and the noise on our metal roof was deafening.  Mazo said he had seen something similar when he was a small boy, but not since then. Immanuel, who is in his 20s, said he had never seen anything like this before. So, it really was a surprising phenomenon for all of us.

Mary Lou took this short video of the hailstorm.

Some areas of Arusha had accumulation which looked like snow on the ground.

Nothing else of import happened. I did make choroko again with Russian sausages from Meat King, and we ate this stew on rice.  John said it was very good, which is all that counts when I cook.