Masimo

While we're still not finished posting our holiday-stories, life goes on in Morwa. We drive to town to see friends, clients and suppliers, and to shop. We try our hand at gardening, carpentry, needlework, and so on. Maud's ice-cream-experiments are a routine by now, so she added mixing up lemonades.
Meanwhile the life of most of our fellow-Morwans is taken over by the masimo. It finally started to rain again, which means it's time to plough and sow, and kill the zillion corn-crickets. The elderly ladies, who traditionally are managing the lands, have been restless for some time already. The bags of flour, tea, and other necessities have been bought, the seeds are sorted; everything is ready but for the rain. Now that 'pula a jana' (the rain is here), they have to mobilize their unwilling family-members to join them. "These young people - nowadays they only want to go out and sleep in", they complain. Another complication is the tractor: it's only Pula 250 per morgen to plough, but everyone wants the tractor to come now now.


Bashi took us to his family-masimo. His aunt & uncle planted after the first rains, and are living on their lands with one of their grandsons to look after the crops (maize, sorghum, sugarcane, beans, and members of the pumpkin-family). In the old days the grannies and little kids used to live on the masimo the whole growing season. Also in the old days they had a lot of goats and chickens there, but not anymore, because the Zimbabweans will steal them, people say. Word has it they'll nick the harvest also, and sell it behind Gabs' buss-station, but so far we've only seen them as labour on the commercial farms, working for next to nothing.


Bashi's grandmother has been looking forward to this since moths. Tradition or not, her black clothes, to be worn for a year after her husbands death, will have to go when the rains start, she announced early November, as she send B&B to Mochudi to get supplies for her living on the masimo.