Buckets

So I thought I’d change it up a bit and give you a lighthearted entry: a look into my life through my buckets. So I own 4 buckets in my house. 3 are green and 1 is orange. Two are big enough that I can fold myself and fit in. One is midsize and round and the orange one is small. These buckets define multi-use; in a day I use them a hundred different ways.
First thing each morning I use one for washing dishes then one for watering the seedlings in my garden. I wash my clothes at the well with the two biggest. Every evening one becomes my bathing bucket. The smallest one gets used for handwashing all day, watering trees and flowerbushes, and for special footbaths. When my chicks got sick I tried to save them by turning the bucket into an incubator. I didn’t succeed. 1 point for Newcastle disease, 0 for me.
On special occasions my green bathing bucket moonlights to do things like shucking maize. When I harvested my maize my neighbors helped me shuck it. Kernels in the bucket and cobs got thrown out. Just last week all 4 buckets saw action when I learned and perfected my sorghum shelling. It’s alot more work than maize, but fun learning from one of my favorite women.
I biked in June with one of my large buckets to the house of a neighboring farmer with cows. I biked home with cow manure (dry and mature of course) to use in my garden beds. During my family’s visit the buckets got used by kids in my village to collect pebbles for lining my bathing shelter. I paid them with candy. The kids, not the buckets!
Probably less often than I should, I sweep the dirt out of my house and a bucket acts as a dustpan.
Well I hope this has been an enjoyable look at the ways I and every woman in this culture use buckets in daily activities. I’ll finish with one last anecdote. Last week I piled my orange bucket full of delicious sweet potatoes from a neighbor and carried it home on my head. It never fell, but I had to walk slowly. I decided this is symbolic; I haven’t mastered the daily activities like a Zambian woman, but I’m trying.