Plastering, Flooring, and Small Successes

Flooring and Plastering
When I wrote about making houses, I left out the part about plastering the walls and making the floors. I actually have an awesome video of a flooring, but I have no idea how to post it.
Plastering the walls of a room is essential, because if a room is not plastered, the mud will wash away in the rain. Men are responsible for building the rooms, but women are responsible for both plastering and flooring.
The plaster is made of gravel, cement, mud, and crushed up termite mounds. The ingredients are mixed into a fairly moist gob, and then the women throw the mud at the bottom of the wall and slide it upwards. Throwing the gob of plaster insures that it gets into all the little cracks in the mud, and then a swift upward movement of the hand smoothes it out. This is repeated until the entire building is covered.
I didn’t see the ingredients in the flooring, but I know it involves gravel, mud, and dawadawa. Dawadawa is a spice that comes from the seed pod of a tree. When you split open a pod, the inside looks like yellow chalk. It tastes like Smarties candy, but a little less sugary and more chalky, if that’s possible. Unlike Smarties, dawadaw can be added to soups, where it tastes a lot better than it does raw. Dawadawa has quite a bit of protein. It also has something that helps floors stay solid, and is added to the flooring.
When a house needs to have the floor built, a woman will call together all her female friends, neighbors, and relatives. They all come together and sing songs and pound the floor in rhythm with a special club. It takes about an afternoon. You can hear a flooring from quite a ways away.
If the family is putting concrete over the top of the floor, the women will polish the concrete until it is smooth using a stone. Not everyone can afford concrete.

Small Victories
The first piece of advice I got about Peace Corps service was to really hold on to the small victories, because work here is frustrating. Here are a few of my small victories:
1. I can carry my groceries on my head without using my hands. I also carried all the equipment to start a soap making business on my head. Couldn’t lift it up there myself, but I could carry it. I can’t carry water- yet. It’s a little harder because it sloshes.
2. All the kids in the village next to mine know my name, so they shout that out instead of siliminga (white person) when I walk thru to go to market. Teaching them all to use my name has taken a lot of work and a lot of patience, but they’ve all got it now. Hearing my Dagboni name is a lot less annoying than hearing siliminga shouted out over and over again.
3. My language is sufficient for me to be able to sell kola nuts at market. My seller wanted to go pray, so she let me run her stall at market for about half an hour. People thought it was hilarious, but I was pleased that I was able to do it without any confusion over my weak language skills.
4. I overheard one of the women in my hearth program telling another mother about the importance of breastfeeding. Couldn’t quite get the whole conversation, but I heard enough to know she was passing on good information from our program. I also had one of the husbands come up and thank me for the program- he said his wife was learning a lot.