Permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

I am waiting eagerly for water. We used up all the water we had to the last drop, last night we don't even have driking water. Today is water day, when we get water, and usually it should be coming out and it's not. We barely watered all our plants because we did not have enough water this week. This is the reason why I harvested most of the spinach leaves at the beginning of the week, to reduce water losses, I left the middle leaves, the small ones only. This is how my garden looks (in the pics), after seven + days of barely watering, of course in the afternoons the leaves will be badly wilted. They look healthy and this makes the trouble of the keyhole garden, filled with organic material, worth it. It was so much easier to just grow on the ground like in most households and the rats are not as stubborn, but the keyhole bed is now paying off. It keeps the moisture and needs cloe to zero feeding.

I gambled with the long Thai bean plants. I had put it in a pot and the level of the soil had gone down a lot after sometime, so I took it out and filled the base with cut banana trunks and added more soil, to create more room for roots to grow in. My fear was I would l disturb it and potentially kill it, but I did not, so that's a relief. For the pumpkin plant, I keep working on the fence and today is the first time I have not seen any of the leaves eaten, maybe I have managed to close all the big openings that the rats would use to get in.

We had rice and spinach stems today. I was concerned about how my sister would take it, she didn't complain so I am guessing she is okay with them. The spinach served us two meals in this week and we have 4 more servings from frozen spinach. I can safely say we can now truly afford a daily meal that is eaten by the poorest households, of starch and kale, which can be eaten daily in bad times. This is without any assistance from our sister.

I tried to bring up the time issue with my sister and it was almost going south. I was not direct, and I don't think she has a clue of what I want to say. Tonight I am going to be direct, and I will ask her to help me on how I should have communicated softly. I have done all the actions I can possibly do I am not getting my message through.

Today is not the best day for bringing up my issue. I had a discussion with both my sisters on whether we need to verbalize values and consciously plan some common ones and they seem to believe these things just happen on their own. So I am still going to wait for an ideal time. I will not push to verbalize things too much, but things are changing a lot and we cannot afford not to talk about somethings for us  to have unified actions to make things better and in a direction that's intentional.

I feel betrayed today. I mentioned earlier that this month we will be eating the chickens we have. We we got our share and we found that the chickens had eggs inside of them. I cannot help thinking that Mai Kumbi and her family have been eating eggs and claiming that the chickens have not been laying any eggs. I am trying to find ways to make our place profitable with the little we have and if there is a chance that they have been eating eggs and lying about it, it is not fair. Maybe we could have been adding pan cakes to our meals for some time now....

We were not able to fetch enough water for the week because the hours we got water were few. So again this week we have very little water for watering plants. I cut beet greens and we had them for lunch. I actually like them. This is the 3rd day in a space of two weeks when our relish is from the keyhole garden.

My sister has started putting her own plants in pots. She has a strawberry plant she planted and it already has fruit.

I woke up to seeing a male pumkin flower on my plant and the plant still looks healthy there is no mould on the leaves. I am still working on getting the rats out, they keep finding a way into the fenced area.
I have started planting sweet potatoes in bags.