A happy home is pretty, clean, filled with good food and surrounded by gardens. It takes planning and maintenance. Here’s a little tour behind the scenes of a typical month.
GOOD EATING
The kitchen is a hot spot. Camille spends an average of two and a half hours a day in meal preparation. Here’s a good example of the outcome – a tasty bowl of curry with mango, crushed almonds and shredded basil. She often has help, like the evening of the 23rd when Allison and Melanie jumped in on falafel night. After the frying was done, we all sat down with plates of home made falafel, flat bread, tzatziki and veggies and watched “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”
RAW MATERIALS
Bob brought home $2.50 in Yams like no other yams we’ve ever seen. They looked like little hands and feet! Some of them found their way into another curry later on in the month. Camille likes to do her shopping on foot and is always amazed at what $15 can buy. This bodacious stash weighed about 25 pounds. When the produce gets too heavy, Camille hails a cab to carry it home for $1.50.
EATING TO LIVE
We’re exploring a low-fat, low-carb, no salt, sugar, oil, caffeine, alcohol or animal product diet. A typical breakfast consists of banana, mango and pineapple. Lunch is generally a salad with greens from the garden plus market cucumbers, avocado and beets topped with chick peas, tofu or pumpkin seeds and a tahini/lemon dressing. Dinner is a bean stew (chili or chick pea curry) or veggie stew involving onions, pepper, garlic, cabbage, squash, daikon radish, with eggplant and greens from the garden. And cauliflower on the side. Always cauliflower on the side… Now you see how easy it is to spend two or three hours in the kitchen.
MAKING IT PRETTY
A trader, Mr. Ali comes by on a regular basis and this month Bob couldn’t resist buying this delightful carving. With Summer interns going and coming, cleaning the spare bedrooms sometimes finds its way to Camille’s To Do list.
WINDOW ART IN THE GARDENS
A cucumber vine on the second floor deck garden climbs alongside the louvered window with the aid of some poly twine. Downstairs in the back yard garden, a weed has taken root in a window sill while a volunteer squash plant threatens to take over the garden. For more garden pictures, please see: Two Gardens
A BIG YARD
Although we live inside a walled compound, we don’t feel penned-in because the house is surrounded on three sides by lawn and gardens. The front of the house is paved in concrete, so it’s more like a parking lot but perfect for hanging laundry and hosting parties.
KEEPING UP A FRONT
First impressions count and the first thing anyone sees when they arrive at Casa Kumasi is our handsome blue wall and trim green lawn. The lawn is so inviting that the neighbor’s dogs routinely lay there to gnaw on bones and other leftover trash they find around the neighborhood. It’s an ongoing battle to keep up the front, so to speak. Camille wrote about the finer points of this endeavor on our blog, Plastic Farm Animals, here: Breaking Point
OBRONI ELECTRIC
Power outages, locally referred to as “lights out” were a weekly, if not daily occurrence for most of our first year here. Of late, it has gotten much better. Sometimes the lights would be off for a few minutes, come back on for a few minutes and go off again. This lights out/lights on phenomenon is referred to as Dumso Dumso or “on/off, on/off”. One night we were eating in a restaurant and the lights went on and off at least 60 times in quick succession, creating a disorienting strobe light effect. We never go to dinner without our flashlights and the images from that evening are of disjointed movements as everyone fished for their light. When this kind of thing happens, Bob jokes that a troop of monkeys have gotten loose in the control room and they’re bouncing off the walls, bumping the switches on and off.
Most of the time the power stays off for 10-12 hours. On Christmas day our power was off for 15 hours leading to spoiled food. To fix this problem, Bob and Rob installed a generator in the shed outside our kitchen with long extension cords which feed emergency electricity to the house. When the lights go out, we wait a few hours to see if they’ll come back on before firing up Obroni Electric.
DUMSO DUMSO
The locals tend to roll with the punches and made light of their plight with this catchy tune and a playful new greeting, “Dumso, Dumso, Ya Mahama!” (John Mahama is the president of Ghana.)
GOT THAT COMPOST PILE COVERED
We are quite proud of our household composting system, especially since Bob and Jay sourced a supply of wood shavings to use as cover material. Interestingly, we don’t know of anyone else in Kumasi who composts. Most people put all their brush, kitchen scraps, leftovers, paper, cardboard and plastic in a pile and torch it off once a week or so, which explains the poor air quality in Kumasi. We self-haul our plastics and recycling to the landfill in a taxi, burn the paper products and compost the rest.
MORE PRETTINESS
After the goats moved on to greener pastures, Camille prettied up these two small beds in the front of the house with Caladium and Sweet Basil.
FIRST FLOOR ENTRYWAY
Camille took a picture of our side entrance and lawn about an hour before sundown on July 26th.