Day to Day...on the road!

(Written June 14th)

          

      And so it began… the first day on the road to visit our first district. Mongovolas, within the Province of Nampula. It’s our closest survey location, with only a two hour drive. Actually, the small town which we ‘head-quartered’ ourselves for four days was only 70Km, but the roads don’t make things easy! Almost entirely unpaved, big bumps, bicycles, pedestrians, and flatbed trucks full of people were the most common obstacles on sometimes one-lane roads. However, the drive was beautiful!

                Our plan is to find a ‘home-base’ at each main location and then visit two different villages every day. Our hotel for this past week was decently nice, but I did have to get used to things like having one shared bathroom for all the guests and no running water; however, there was hot water for showers! We just had to ask for hot water from the kitchen when we were ready to shower J

                So far I’ve visited four different villages, as our team divides into two and each group visits a different village. Sometimes our drive is up to an hour from our ‘home-base’ in the town. I’ve really enjoyed visiting these various places, as each village has a different feel and something new to me. I usually spend my time visiting the enumerators at various houses or work on my laptop on the tailgate of our truck. The picture below sums up my normal view pretty well: we have one of the enumerators speaking with a resident, a woman with child carrying wood, and an animal or two. Since the villages are fairly large, I sometimes have people accompany me as I move around visiting the rest of the team. Below is my little tour guide!

Why Peanuts??

                Before coming here, I knew peanuts were an important crop for this region, but I did not know to what extent. The more we are out in the field, the more I’m learning about the valuable role of peanuts for these nearly subsistence farmers. As the data is starting to come it, generally, it can be noted that these families have very little access to animal products but eat peanuts almost everyday—important for protein intake. For many of the farmers, selling small amount of peanuts (a few sacks a year) is the only household revenue. Grown entirely without mechanization and usually even hulled by hand, it is a labor-intensive crop. In one out of the four villages, only one had the machine pictured below to assist them with removing the peanut shells—But even this is laborintensive with the hand-crank!

               

 

Finally, I will conclude with a fun picture with a group of kids. Adults and children alike absolutely love to have their picture taken! Many have never seen a camera before, so when my camera comes out, a crowd of people does too. Actually, some the kids in this group were pretty scared of me at first, because they have never seen someone who looks like I do, but they warmed up.