It's (maybe) Really Time for the Hot Chocolate!

It's chilly! For the past couple weeks it has been getting lighter and lighter, earlier and earlier...the sun has set by 6:15 the last week or so. This morning I wore a scarf, short sleeved shirt, jeans, and shoes, not flip flops, to work and was cold all day... should have brought my jacket. It's a nice 70 degrees in my room right now and I think tonight I'm going to use an extra blanket while I sleep.
Besides busting out extra clothes, people in Metz have been busy preparing for Winter for a couple of months now. Mealies have been harvested, morogo has been cooked and then dried, and all the blankets and duvets in the house have been washed.
MmaDiapo has been cooking up a storm in order to have some food ready for the upcoming months. She picks the morogo (leaves of various vegetable plants... pumpkin, green beans, etc.) at her farm, packs it in a bag to carry home, and then spends a few hours every afternoon cooking in a 3 legged pot over the fire. People prepare it all different ways... it's all a matter of taste... MmaDiapo prefers a simple recipe of onions and some spices. Once the leaves have been cooked down and are the consistency of steamed spinach, they are scooped out of the pot onto a big piece of tin (the same kind used for my roof!) to dry in the sun. When it's all dry, it's stored in big mealie meal bags to use when Winter comes. In order to cook the dried version, you just add water to it and cook until it's back to what it looked like when you first cooked it down.
Woo! Then there are the mealies. Here they are drying in the sun in the yard. Once dried they will be used for chicken feed and ground into mealie meal for the coming months... until it's time for mealies to grow again in the Summer.
Here's the grindstone my family used to use when it was time to make meal. They'd sit under the guava tree and grind the mealies into a fine powder. But, like a lot of things, some people in the village are moving away from (some) traditional ways. A few months ago Kodumela was able to purchase a new grinding machine, bigger and faster, with money they had made with their old one.
And here's Danny working the machine. All the mealie kernels he's pushing through are going to become samp (sort of like hominy ), the bag directly underneath him is catching all the kernels, the bag to the left and in front is to catch all the chaff. The other side of the machine grinds the kernels even finer, into meal, and the chaff is collected in the same place. On any given day, this guy is covered from head to toe in white dust.... just yesterday they started wearing masks. When I hang around them long enough, the dust and smell very much bring me back to working rice harvest in Gueydan (What, What Gueydan, LA!). Hard work for sure... but there's something to be said for having a part in your meal and where it's all coming from.