Daily Living At Galmi

Life takes a bit more time around here than other places. Take for example cooking and baking, especially when it’s not your kitchen and when you’re using 2 kitchens at that. As there are friends coming by to greet and visit it’s the hospitable thing to serve a drink (water, coke, lemonade, etc) and even a bit of food. The banana bread Linda made for me has been eaten up so I made a loaf not knowing how the oven would work. There’s no temperature markings on it, nor did I initially have a thermometer. Well, the oven was quite hot and the bread was getting quite brown, even black on top & bottom. After maybe turning it down it still was hot. I later came to find out it has one temperature –hot, like 550*. Okay, so we’ll use Linda’s oven from now on.

I’ve always enjoyed the style of shopping here –the vendors come to your door. One comes with mangoes, another tomatoes & cabbage, another meat, another with eggs. It’s very helpful. Another thing I’ve enjoyed here is having househelp, someone to come in and clean up my mess in the kitchen. Rabi comes nearly everyday to see what she can do for me. Today she cut up the meat so we could grind it and sliced the onion (as they’re very hot and cause tears to flow. I told her it’s her turn to cry). She’ll come tomorrow and help Linda & I as we make New Year cookies for the compound. It’s been my tradition to do this at New Year’s and tomorrow happens to be a holiday here. A friend makes & sells peanut oil and brought me some today for the cookies. A friend of Linda’s who is farming onions (the local cash crop), carrots, lettuce, etc brought her a 10lb (or more) bag of carrots which were quite small. That evening we prepared half of them for making carrot cake for more visitors. This morning I made yogurt. With the heat one doesn’t need a yogurt maker and it takes about 3-4 hours.

So that’s a bit of daily living here.