Shelling Maize

Shelling Maize, 

The other day Alice and the crew were shelling maize, well getting it off of the husk.  There’s a think cloud of white dust everywhere and people hauling maize to the guys to bag it. It’s like clock work here.  Alice is supervising the whole process.  Women are in the pole barn getting the husks into large bags so the men can put it threw the machine.  So I go to take a picture of the women and there are 4 butts in the air.  Finally they realize what I’m doing and they all begin to laugh.  I laugh myself and walk back to Alice. She wants to know why are they laughing, so I tell her what happened. The whole maize thing has been going on all day and it’s almost 3pm. There are about 40 huge sacks of maize ready to go to market and they are still shelling. 

After a while I go into the house and change out of my long pants and put on a cool pair of shorts so I can just hand out and do nothing for a while.  Well guess what happens? It starts to sprinkle. So I go outside and think nothing of a few rain drops, and everyone is still working away. I pet Simba and Max and then come inside the house. Some time passes and then I hear this loud noise which sounds like rocks hitting the roof.  It’s not rocks, it’s rain! It’s pouring outside, literally raining so hard you can’t see. 

Then Edna comes running in the house and she’s soaking wet, literally from head to toe she soaked. Then unknownst to me, Alice went somewhere with some other ladies and they drive up in a pick up with 5 ladies in the back of the truck. Well, they were soaking wet too. And the rain is still coming down in buckets.  All of the ladies run to Alice’s front porch to get out of the rain. I have no idea where they went or what they were doing, although I have my own ideas. So we all stand out on the porch until the rain stops, and it does after about 45 minutes. Then the ladies all take off except Alice. 

Here in Kitale, it rains like this often, well all the time from what I understand. It’s not the rainy season yet, not really but it’s rained pretty good twice in the last couple of weeks. I’m wondering what it’s going to be like when the rainy season starts. I have a feeling it will be very muddy and I’m sure one of my shirts will turn into a “red dirt shirt.”