How Do We Get Honey (by Louisa)

We have been harvesting honey! So today we learned a bit about how we get honey!

How do we get honey?

We get honey from bees. Bees get pollen from the flowers and then the bees go back to their hive with the nectar in their nectar sac. They give the nectar to the house bee and she chews it for half an hour and it turns into sugar. She puts this in the honeycombs, little hexagonal pockets and it turns into honey in there. When the pocket is full, the bee puts a lid of wax on the top. Then you can take the honey out.

Getting the Honey

Mbwilo, our guard, came at night time to get our honey. We all went out to watch (but didn't want to get too close to the bees). He had a net over him and wore rubber gloves. He made a smoky fire to smoke the bees out. Then he got all the honeycomb out of the hive and put it all in three big buckets. He brushed the bees off the combs with a rosemary branch.

Smoking out the bees

Honey in the honeycomb ... and lots of bees!

Brushing the comb with rosemary

 

The next day, we mashed up the honeycomb and then sieved the honey through a mosquito net. We hung the mosquito net up high with string and hung it over the bucket to let it drip into the bucket. It is still dripping!

 

I had honey toast for lunch. Do you like honey?  I love honey, it makes you funny. Mum thinks I've had too much honey!

Baby Amisadai and Village Life

I thought I would tell you a bit about what it is like living in Kimande. Here is a photo of me washing our clothes. We get some water from the water point outside and then pour water and soap powder in a bucket and wash the clothes with our hands. Then we rinse the clothes and then rinse them again! The water gets very dirty because the clothes are so dirty! A few kids came to watch me when I was washing and then the audience grew!

Washing clothes in the shade.

More kids came to watch!

I love the donkeys that wander around the village! But I don't like the noise they make. I tried to go and pat this donkey, but it ran away! The donkeys are used to pull carts.

Washing dishes in Kimande is a very different job compared to England. There is no electricity, so no dishwasher. We get water from the water point outside and fill bowls to wash and rinse. The sufurias (metal cooking pots) get very black from the fire and it doesn't rinse off in water. So you use dirt from the ground with some water and scrub with your hands very hard. It doesn't seem like it would work because it makes it dirtier! But really when you wash off the mud, it is shiny silver again! Here is a photo of Mummy washing a sufuria outside our house.

Singing for the team in the Kimande Church

Last week in Kimunde, a team from England came to visit our house. There were 14 of them! They had been staying in The Neema Craft guest-house. When they came to Kimunde, they stayed for a cup of Tanzanian chai (tea). A few of them said was too sweet! We took them round the village to places like the office of the Pawaga Officer, the church and the hospital. At the office, we had sodas! At the church we did some singing and drumming. But the hospital was the most exciting thing. We saw a two-hour-old baby girl! The mum (a relative of Mendriad's) was very tired. But she didn't have a name for the baby yet.


Going to this hospital is not at all like going to the hospital in Basingstoke! You walk on hot sand with the scorching sun shining on you. The ground is hard and thorny. At the hospital, there is no gate or barrier. It is all open. There are quite a few one layer buildings, all for different things. One for injections, one for having babies, one for men and one for women. The one for giving birth is very unlike ones in Canada and England, there are only three beds, which have no sheets, only plastic, which are not very clean. The rooms are very small. But next door is a sitting area, where guests to see patients can sit.

We went to see the baby again later that day, after the team had left. She is lovely. But she still didn't have a name! The next day we went, and the mum was not so tired then. They didn't have a name and they asked me to think of one! I said Sophie, because that is the name of one of my friends in Aldermaston. They asked for another name and I couldn't think of one but I told her my name and asked if they like that. They said yes, and so the baby is called Amisadai! They even wrote it on the medicine box! They had to stay in the hospital for a few days as the mama had lost blood and had a poorly heart. The nurse said they needed to find someone in her family to care for her so that she could rest when she left, before they would let her leave the hospital. The hospital is a short walk from our house and I visited them every day.



Amisadai, Amisadai and the Nurse



Me and Baby Amisadai