Rufaro Makamure

All the areas I am focusing on,  seem to be changing levels at the same time. I spent the last week + working out  where I need things to go. I will start with the easiest of them, the keyhole garden. The plants are growing beautifully. The beets I transplanted have changed and I enjoy watching my sister picking things from the garden. The rats are now digging from underneath the wire mesh.  However unlike all the other times, this time as I am figuring out how to deal with the rats, I know it's me who has an upper hand and a couple of plants will be damaged, but I cannot take things to heart, because this is life. It's a constant battle until I find a solution.

My plan is to use whatever resource I have. The level of the soil within the beds is lowering daily and this is starting to create a gap between the soil and the wire mesh, so I fill the edges with soil. Then I found some really old fence and laid it around the plants, followed by potato sacks and then a lot of twigs which I got from the guava tree. Last night was the first night after putting these layers and it's the first night in 2 days that no rats got into the spinach area. All I need is to keep the nice spinach plants big and healthy until the 8th. I will be showing mai Kumbi the garden, for her to see what can be possible especially with beets if we feed our soil good enough.

After this I will be taking care of the area but the actual plan is to allow the soil to go as low as is possible and I will put the mesh right around the pavers layer as well, to reduce any possibility of rats getting into the bed.

The plants are not doing well in the heat anymore. We talked about how we want to use our water with my sister in normal times. We are to fetch enough water to use in the house as well as watering our plants. Then we will also do our washen as the week ends, as opposed to doing it on a Saturday. This gives us enough time to concentrate on just fetching water on the days we get water, which is Saturday and Sunday. I assumed that when we do not get enough water, we will remove washing from within the week and put it back on Saturday. My sister sees it differently.

I can not go against what we spoke about, but I am tempted to sneak some water out of the house. The desire is so strong, and I don't want to start another conversation on this because already I have pending issues, and I am boring my sisters with talks. Relationships have a huge impact on progress and also on the choice of actions people end up doing. I am almost going to steal water. These moments are very humbling, and in life I will judge people less.

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.

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 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....

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 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.

When mai Kumbi came she brought veggies for the week. It's now a lot and we have a consistent supply. I am sharing my part of the profit with my sister, the one I am staying with, this is because my siblings have allowed me to freely work at the plot without much trouble. Also it's only fair for her to benefit from her property. All this while she was not entirely supporting my approach to the kind of labor I want and what I believe they should get, even how I farm was kind of of an issue.

She has not said much, but she is becoming more supportive and her nonverbal actions are leaning more towards okaying what's happening, and it's  coming from within her.

The next step is to figure out how to make her see that as opposed to the norm, we can use the properties we were left with as a stepping stone to earning our living, as opposed to relying on  the properties to take care of us, without any of our own effort. This way, we will have something sustainable and fair. This means that we now have to work to develop things so that we keep on improving mai Kumbi's living standard, it will in turn push her to want to do more and growth will be inevitable, for both our families.

This morning has been an eventful morning. It was not exactly exciting at first. My sister was late for devotion and she is not moved when she is not on time for things we agree on, and for 2 days now I have been watching this without saying anything. I am not good at time keeping either but we have been talking about how we need to change this, so we need to put an effort towards this, she is not. I cannot tell her how I am feeling because I am working on how to deliver issues I am not happy about in a gentle way, which has been something she has been complaining I am bad at. I have to figure out how to not be too blunt about this time issue. Because I have something I am keeping from her, it's been hard for me to converse with her, and she noticed it and she is also went quiet on me.

After yesterday, I decided to cut a banana bunch today, so that we can share with mai Kumbi. The challenge was that, I could not ask my sister to help me and the task took me long, as I was working out how to protect the pumkin plant as well as to keep away from the power line. Half way through my task I saw a chameleon on one of the leaves that I needed to cut off, as I was getting the bunch. I called my sister to help me remove it. She is terrified of them, but she came and she was supposed to keep the leaf steady as I cut it. I was under the branch, so any funny action the little creature was going to fall on me. We worked so perfectly together, in between so much screaming. I got the chameleon on a metal rod and it was staring right at me. Before, I kind of believed my feelings are close to zero, like, I feel indifferent about so many things that I see, as compared to those around me react to. I have removed chameleons but this one was too close for comfort, I was holding the rod and screaming at the top of my voice, I did not care what the neighbors would say, which is usually an important thing to me. I ran out of the gate bare foot my sister rushed to me at a very safe distance with my shoes and threw them to me. I was able to move the chameleon far from our house safely. The little creature got my sister and I talking, so I'm happy about that. I am also happy to experience feeling something (scared and knowing and expressing the emotion right in the moment like I did). I would love a lot of this, well not necessarily chameleons and being scared, but knowing how I feel when I am in the moment and being able to express it.

I met with mai Kumbi today, closing the month's sales. Again we increased our revenue. We increased by 26% from last month. The figures are still low relative to normal activities that can be classified as a business. I am glad that now we can buy a number of grocery items, that can push us a long way through the month.  We had rape and mustard leaves that helped us boost our sales of covo or kale. This coming month we won't be having these. What we did is to plant kale/covo in between rape and mustard plants. Kale remains in beds that we are removing rape, so this is what will add to the original kale beds.  I am hoping we won't drop in sales. I had thought that the beetroot we have been planting within the kale beds would have matured by now, but the beets at the plot are taking time to grow big. We are also getting one chicken each from our birds. They are not giving us eggs, and we both need meat for our households, it is a blessing in disguise. I think we did not have enough feed for this project and the chickens could not give us eggs consistently.

I am concerned about mai Kumbi's health, she looks smaller. I am suspecting her maize is finished and there is nothing I can do. We have to find a way to accelerate our growth, I know we will be okay.