Through the Dark and the Cold

I regret that no one has updated the blog for so long. We have some good excuses. I hope we will resume fairly regular updates now.

The day length does not change so greatly here.  But we do lose about an hour of daylight.  It was that hour of more or less free time that was spent on the computer.

Also, it got cold. I once wrote that winter never comes here. I really had no idea what I was talking about. For the past few months the temperature has been in the low 60's. Don't laugh!

All of us have been working in the heat.  Our bodies have changed.  We can do hard physical labor with the temperatures in the mid to high 90's.  Because of the humidity, the heat index is normally well over 100.  But there is a cost to this change.  During December and January the temperatures dipped below 70 degrees.  At night we bundled up with many blankets.  In the morning we would wear multiple layers of clothing.  Johnny, who is amazingly resourceful managed to come up with a pair of gloves.

Rebecca wrote to several people that we did not want to use gasoline to power the computer.  This was mostly true but unclear.  We had been using a generator to charge the batteries for the electric fence.  This resulted in periodic "free" electricity.  While the batteries were charging, we had computer time.

There were technical problems with the fence, but we struggled to get past them.  Eventually, practical problems made the electric fence useless.  During the dry season, no paddock was large enough to feed the sheep, not even for a little while.  They needed to forage the entire east meadow, every day.

Another reason there were no updates is that I am always reluctant to talk much about the troubles we endure, at least until we have overcome them.  We had some troubles.

We lost a lamb.  She had been sickly. For a while we believed that she had simply died out in the meadow.  But we could not find her, nor did buzzards ever appear.  During the same week, several chickens vanished.  All these things can happen, but we soon learned that some boys in the nearby village had been caught stealing lambs from various villages in the area.  It seemed we had thieves.  At nearly the same time, our dog Enlil got sick and died.  The dog Enki ran off to pursue a nearby female dog.  He returned periodically, fatter than he left and neatly brushed.  A neighbor, with a dog in heat and several children in the household was feeding him tortillas, brushing him, cleaning the crud from his eyes.  Enki basically found a better deal elsewhere and eventually stopped returning.

With the outbreak of thieving we decided we wanted more dogs.  A young dog believed to be a chicken killer became available.  Maybe he once killed a chicken somewhere, but he is working out very well here.  We named him Gopala.

While the thieving only occurred during one week, we did not know that would be the case.  With the sheep needing to move outside the fenced paddocks and possibly sheep thieves at large we decided to shepherd them full time.  We were taking turns watching the sheep 24 hours a day.  Consequently, we were always exhausted.


A lady arrived with two puppies in a sack.  She said the mother had started to bite them and they were weaned "enough".  They were, and we named them Gestinana and Sirtir.

We name our dogs from figures from other peoples religions or ancient mythologies.  In the myths of ancient Sumer, Gestinana is said to have transformed her brother into an antelope and hidden him in her sheep fold.  This was apparently an attempt to trick some demons that were out to get her brother or something.  The important part of the story is the bit about a sheep fold.

As I recounted the legend to my family, someone asked what a sheep fold was.  It turns out a sheep fold is a place where ancient herdsmen and even primitive cultures to this day lock up their sheep at night.   I think it was Johnny (whose shift was at that time from 4am to noon) who asked why the ancients would do something like that.  It might be that there was a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

Some sheep fencing was purchased and a grove of trees was pressed into service.  With the construction of the sheep fold, we could actually sleep at night.  The sheep remained penned except for two to three hours in the morning and two to three hours in the afternoon.  During these hours, one of us shepherds them around the meadow.

 
Even still the day came when Johnny came to me and said, "I don't think there is anything for them to eat in the meadow".  I had known this was coming.

We began the very bold practice of driving them from the east meadow, down our driveway, up along our road, past the papaya field next door, past the marl pit with the cliff face walls, to the old ruined sugar cane field on the western half of our property.  Here there is sugar cane, wild bean vines, several kinds of grasses, and it has been ungrazed.  The sheep love it.  But it takes all three of us to control them there.

With such manpower demands divided amongst the number of sheep we had, it seemed sensible to buy more sheep.

There is a young couple in the village that had sheep.  Long ago, I had stopped to inquire if they had any for sale.  They did not, they were just getting started with sheep.   We looked for sheep in various villages, but there were none for sale that looked worth buying.  Then this young couple arrived at our house and asked if we wanted to buy.  They had gotten into a bind, they were trying to sell their pickup, but had to get it overhauled first.  That had been done, but the mechanic would not release their truck until he got paid.  They had three sheep, one was pregnant.  These were good looking sheep, a bit thin, but fatter than ours.  They quoted a price, it was a fair one, so we paid it.  I know they would have taken less, but it probably pays to be fair dealing.  So we got two more females and a male.  We will eat the male at some point.  He is not the kind of sheep we want.  One female gave birth to twins, but one was small and died several days later.  The larger lamb is growing very well.

We have lost other lambs.  Aside from the one that was stolen, one died because we did not worm her soon enough.  Another, a lamb from Sheepess was born so weak it never got up, nursed or made any noise.  And Mama gave birth several days ago to three lambs, one was stillborn.

Even still we have now ten lambs and twelve adult sheep.  We have been supplementing their feeding with Cecropia and Jabin trees that we cut for them.  With the trees and the west meadow we hope to carry them through the dry season.

We planted a great deal of indigo, and it is growing well.  However the sheep do not much eat indigo.

The chicken project has meet with some success and some setbacks.  The first generation of chickens that was hatched here is now laying, setting and raising their own chicks.  Yet we have had terrible blows, such as an entire clutch of eggs that were apparently not fertilized, and nearly entire hatches of chicks killed by fire ants.






So we have been busy.  The dry season has been hard on the sheep, and surprisingly hard on the chickens. Life has been a bit rough for us lately.  We hope that when the rain returns it will bring some optimism for us.