From the house
As I sit typing this we wait for another potential flood. Now that I have my laptop here at the house I can type away when the moment hits me even if disaster lurks just around the corner. It’s been raining since around 10:30 this morning and its now about 2:15 and still coming down. The street is more flooded then I have ever seen it. There were actually kids swimming in our street. It’s even worse than last time when our house flooded but luckily the new block wall around the field behind our house is holding so we haven’t been inundated yet. We did however discus our plan of action should action be necessary. We moved some things off the floor and the shovel and rice bags are on standby ready to be made into sandbags for the back doors. Several of our neighbor’s hoses have already flooded and I went walking around to a few of them to see if I could help out. So much water its amazing it all came from the sky in just the last few hours. These types of days always start out so normal. Lying around reading a book thinking what a nice relaxing Sunday it is and then somewhere along the line things change or it suddenly becomes apparent that we might have a problem. For now we just hope the wall holds and are glad the rain is here so the crops will grow.
Not sure if I have mentioned before that I am in the process of making Mango wine. Readers of the blog will remember the cashew apple wine that I made earlier. That came out pretty good after a few tries but was a bit simpler because it used mostly natural yeasts and sugar and I just had to squeeze the fruit to get the juice out. For some time now I have been planning to make mango wine since there are obviously a ton of mangos around. I had planed to go to the fruit market and by a bunch of mangos but as luck would have it the day I was getting ready to make wine a commercial farm near Brikama donated a bunch of mangos to the college and I got a while crate of mangos for free. Sweet deal and what good timing! The other ingredients were water, yeast and sugar all of which I could find locally as well. My plan was to make it in a 10 liter jug that I got for this exact purpose so the first step was to cut about 18 mangos up into little chunks and put them into the jug. Then I filled the rest of the jug up with the sugar, water, and yeast. I made an air lock for the jug so air could not get in but the gasses from fermentation could get out. I cut a small hole in the lid of the jug, pushed a tube into the hole and then sealed it with candle wax to make it air tight. Put the other end in a jar of water and voilla you have a check valve of sorts. Anyway up until this point everything was going pretty smoothly. I took the jug and put it under the bed so it was out of the way and it was bubbling away quite rapidly. Lydia questioned why she had to have the strange bubbling science experiment thing under her side of the bed but it was only because it was easier to get to there. After a little while I walked into the bedroom and realized there were no more bubbles and the jug was looking a bit more rounded if you will. I felt it and it was getting pretty hard so I figured there was a clog in the pipe. I took the pipe out of and blew into to clear the blockage and as soon as I too my mouth off a lot of pressure along with some mango puree shot across the room onto the wall, clothes, ect. This was not part of the plan. Apparently with the rapid fermentation the whole mango mush/water combination was expanding quite a bit and the jug was no longer big enough. I opened up the jug and immediately a bunch of mango slop squirted out again around the bedroom. I took out what I thought would be enough of the mango and water to allow it to continue on the way and sealed it back up. Well I guess it wasn’t enough because about an hour later Lydia called me in from the porch and said she heard a loud noise from the bedroom. I went back there and there was water and mango sprayed around the room near the jug. I guess what happened is the pipe clogged again and then was subsequently cleared again under great pressure which shot stuff all over the place. At this point I decided to switch an open bucket with a rag over it and let it get through the rapid fermentation. Since then it been going pretty well. I left it in the open bucket for about 4 days and then squeezed out the mango pulp and put the juice back into the original jug and its been sitting under the bed for about a week with no explosions so far. Another few weeks and we can taste test it.
The last two weekends we have been out running around doing stuff with other PCVs or with the 4th of July stuff or whatever but it was great to hang out and relax at the compound this weekend. We have been just reading and chatting with our host family and whatnot. Lydia decided she needed to learn more technical skills (think napoleon dynamite) to balance out her creative/artistic side and for practical use so we started going through the some books to get some ideas. We started with navigation yesterday. We have a compass, map and a ruler so she would read about some topic and then we would talk about it and then I showed her how to plot a course, plot location, and work between magnetic and true bearings. It was fun in a nerdy sort of way. She has a whole list of things she wants to work on from knots to wiring.
That’s it for now. Any questions?
Not sure if I have mentioned before that I am in the process of making Mango wine. Readers of the blog will remember the cashew apple wine that I made earlier. That came out pretty good after a few tries but was a bit simpler because it used mostly natural yeasts and sugar and I just had to squeeze the fruit to get the juice out. For some time now I have been planning to make mango wine since there are obviously a ton of mangos around. I had planed to go to the fruit market and by a bunch of mangos but as luck would have it the day I was getting ready to make wine a commercial farm near Brikama donated a bunch of mangos to the college and I got a while crate of mangos for free. Sweet deal and what good timing! The other ingredients were water, yeast and sugar all of which I could find locally as well. My plan was to make it in a 10 liter jug that I got for this exact purpose so the first step was to cut about 18 mangos up into little chunks and put them into the jug. Then I filled the rest of the jug up with the sugar, water, and yeast. I made an air lock for the jug so air could not get in but the gasses from fermentation could get out. I cut a small hole in the lid of the jug, pushed a tube into the hole and then sealed it with candle wax to make it air tight. Put the other end in a jar of water and voilla you have a check valve of sorts. Anyway up until this point everything was going pretty smoothly. I took the jug and put it under the bed so it was out of the way and it was bubbling away quite rapidly. Lydia questioned why she had to have the strange bubbling science experiment thing under her side of the bed but it was only because it was easier to get to there. After a little while I walked into the bedroom and realized there were no more bubbles and the jug was looking a bit more rounded if you will. I felt it and it was getting pretty hard so I figured there was a clog in the pipe. I took the pipe out of and blew into to clear the blockage and as soon as I too my mouth off a lot of pressure along with some mango puree shot across the room onto the wall, clothes, ect. This was not part of the plan. Apparently with the rapid fermentation the whole mango mush/water combination was expanding quite a bit and the jug was no longer big enough. I opened up the jug and immediately a bunch of mango slop squirted out again around the bedroom. I took out what I thought would be enough of the mango and water to allow it to continue on the way and sealed it back up. Well I guess it wasn’t enough because about an hour later Lydia called me in from the porch and said she heard a loud noise from the bedroom. I went back there and there was water and mango sprayed around the room near the jug. I guess what happened is the pipe clogged again and then was subsequently cleared again under great pressure which shot stuff all over the place. At this point I decided to switch an open bucket with a rag over it and let it get through the rapid fermentation. Since then it been going pretty well. I left it in the open bucket for about 4 days and then squeezed out the mango pulp and put the juice back into the original jug and its been sitting under the bed for about a week with no explosions so far. Another few weeks and we can taste test it.
The last two weekends we have been out running around doing stuff with other PCVs or with the 4th of July stuff or whatever but it was great to hang out and relax at the compound this weekend. We have been just reading and chatting with our host family and whatnot. Lydia decided she needed to learn more technical skills (think napoleon dynamite) to balance out her creative/artistic side and for practical use so we started going through the some books to get some ideas. We started with navigation yesterday. We have a compass, map and a ruler so she would read about some topic and then we would talk about it and then I showed her how to plot a course, plot location, and work between magnetic and true bearings. It was fun in a nerdy sort of way. She has a whole list of things she wants to work on from knots to wiring.
That’s it for now. Any questions?
posted by Andy at
5:16 PM
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