Be ti mbi aso. Sango for a sad heart. I wish I had something up beat to
write but there is something else on my heart today. A Central African
injustice that i can do nothing about but bugs me all the same. Laws
regarding women here are so archaic. I shouldn't be surprised but I am.
For example, if a women's husband dies, legally, the house, the belongings
and the children all belong to the extended family of the husband unless he
states otherwise before he dies. Could you imagine losing your children?
The same goes if a women is in a bad marriage and she wants to leave. She
loses everything, including her kids. To leave an abusive relationship
means leaving your kids behind. If you take anything with you you risk be
fined as a thief. Right now there is a situation with one of the cooks.
Her husband took a second wife which she doesn't like at all, being a devout
Christian. The man is very mean and useless when it comes to contributing
to household income. But, she can't leave without leaving her kids and
everything behind. She left hime once before and her kids went to live with
his parents. She came back to him when one of her kids died of neglect. We
are definitely living in a forgotten part of Africa. I shouldn't expect
better of a country whose former president was a reported canibal.
In other thoughts, we celebrated Leonard's 50th birthday today. I asked him
to cook whatever he wanted and he joined us for lunch. It was pretty fun
and the meal was great. We got to practice our Sango a bit too. I have
these strange bumps on my hand and I think they are the beginning of some
new callouses. Fancy that! I have been hauling buckets of water to the
nutrition garden this week since Paulien is away at a women's gathering. I
made it to missionary stage 3 today. Stage three is when you see bugs
floating in your cup and you drink it anyway. Some ants made it into my cup
of tea and I tried fishing them out to no avail so I just drank it. I guess
that is a milestone of sorts.
I am having fun with the language. I learned a new word to day. Fuku ti
wa. Fuku is flour and wa is fire so it is 'fire flour' or fine ashes.
Medar, the supervisor of the nutrition garden brought me a bag of ashes to
spread on some pumpkin plants with a bad bug problem. I can't really get
away from bugs. They are everywhere and I hope to give a short teaching
session on them next week.
In other news, my citrus and carambola grafts met with great success this
week so we are looking at doing a lot of grafting in the next little while,
as soon as we have some good bud wood.
I have joined a ladies bible study, led by Leanne, who also translates for
me. It is a good group of ladies. All but one are cooks on the station,
plus my language helper. Well, more later.
Ange
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