Kopa Street

Today I did something that I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I carved my name into cement before it was fully dry. What happened was that there have been electricians coming to our house for the past week or so, fixing all the wiring and lights, and they had to dig up some wires from underground- so they left a hole. Today Felix and Elias, our gardeners (until tomorrow, because the Hope Training Institute starts on Monday) filled the hole in with cement. Elaine noticed that they had written their names in the cement, so we went and did that too. And so, we’ll all be famous, with our names written in cement. Elaine and I also put our handprints in; that was fun.
I finally got out of the house, because we went for a drive to see our neighbourhood- which none of us had seen. Pretty much every house here has some kind of wall, and gate. Most of the walls are grey bricks, but there is definitely a lot of variety. There are many different kinds of gates though. The ones with spikes on top, the really high ones, the low ones, the ones with glass on top, the black ones, the white ones, the grey ones, the red ones (like ours is right now- but they’re going to paint it black). There are different levels of security for each house. Some have walls, walls with glass, both with barbed wire, all three plus a couple of guard dogs. We have all three, plus my parents who are a bit on the paranoid side. (But everyone is like that the first year- according to the people we’ve talked to.) The strangest thing we saw were two houses side by side, and they didn’t have walls, you could see the actual houses. We are definitely not used to that anymore.
On our drive we went to the tiny market that is less than ten minutes walking distance from our house. When we parked, we found it strange that no one was coming up to our windows, asking for money, or trying to sell something. We bought bread from G&G, and charcoal for our bry from one of the booths.
On our way out we stopped at a peanut stand. There were three ladies sitting on a blanket, on the ground, each with their own pile of peanuts. They were scooping them into cups- that is how they measured them for their price- and then piling them into a large, oversized plastic bowl. I bought 2,000 Kwacha worth, which was a bit smaller than a big grocery store (not convenience store) sized bag that you would buy in Canada. This is equivalent to about 70 cents Canadian. Then we got home, and realized that, upon cracking open a peanut, they were raw. They weren’t cooked, they weren’t roasted, they weren’t boiled. You open them, and either the peanut oil squeezes out under the pressure, or the peanuts inside are covered with white or purple skin. I had never thought about that before. When we buy peanuts in stores they are actually cooked, and salted, and go through this whole process (which we did tonight). You can’t pick a peanut off of its tree and eat it. Who knew?