vila milungu

The puppies are here!

  Dioge had another litter of puppies a couple weeks ago. She had seven again, but unfortunately only four survived the first night. I think these might be cutest ones yet - they look like they a children’s book illustration come to life. They just opened their eyes and are beginning to take their first steps.

Our embrigada Olga has been sick for the past couple weeks which means that we’ve been left to fend for ourselves for all of our meals and house-cleaning. I even found myself raking the dirt in our front yard yesterday - a chore that I originally thought rather silly and useless until I realized how bad it looks when there’s dead leaves all over the place. You can’t have messy looking dirt in your yard; people will start to talk. As for cooking, I must say we’ve done quite well for ourselves. It’s amazing how creative you can be when you’re desperate and have lots of time on your hands. We pulled up our entire basil patch and made enough pesto to last a year, mulberry jam from the tree in the back yard, bought 3 pounds of clams and mussels at the fish market in Maxixe for $0.50 and then splurged on a bottle of white wine to cook them in, made pita bread and hummus and then had some friends over for falafel night, grilled fish over a campfire, and almost every day we slice up tomatoes and put them up on the roof to sun-dry. It’s been really fun, but we miss seeing Olga every day and we’re looking forward to having her back.

Our latest endeavor looks more like a science experiment than a culinary treat, but when our honey started fermenting we decided to try making mead, and then that grew to making ginger ale too, and now we have bottles all over the house with various fungus looking things growing inside them. Jon has quite the system going and likes to check on their progress several times a day. I probably should have known that life with a chemical engineer, and honey that makes a fizzy sound when you open it, doesn’t equate to throwing out said honey, it’s just the beginning of a new chemical process. So far, it’s produced some delicious results.  

 I’ve been busy with the project in Tofo – I’m helping design and manage the construction of three small holiday houses for a South African that we met while we were hitchhiking. It’s definitely been a challenging project and I’m learning all sorts of new things like why you can’t use beach sand for foundations, and how to make your own re-bar columns. The simple logistics to building anything here is amazingly complicated. For one, you have to go to several different vendors for all of your supplies, and then you have to find a way to transport everything. I will ever again take Home Depot for granted. Luckily, our friend James is helping me out – he’s a university student in Maxixe and I think he could run this country someday if he gets the chance, but for now he’s negotiating local prices for me and helping put me in touch with the right people. The houses are all going to be built out of bricks that are made out of the local clay. The bricks are made entirely by hand and the whole process takes about two weeks to complete. In the end, each brick costs about $0.25 – can you imagine how much hand-made bricks would cost in the states? My Portuguese vocabulary is also expanding daily to include words like “sceptic tank” and “brick force” (which, incidentally, is just “breek-forse” in a Portuguese accent. Had I known this already it would have been much simpler than the convoluted direction I took which went something like “do you know the little iron square things that you put between bricks to make a wall very strong? (insert hand motions for small, square, and muscle arms for strong)“.