Our Gardener

            When we moved into our house it already had a gardener and his family living on the property, Dada Cheerwa (spelled phonetically), Mama Cheerwa and their 3 children, Susan, Robert (pronounced Lowbot) and Blessings.   The landlord had let him live free of charge so the house wouldn't appear vacant; apparently vandalism is a problem if a house is vacant.  We agreed to keep him on temporarily for 3 months to ensure that everybody could work together.  It is accepted to hire help temporarily so you can let them go if you have problems and apparently not as easy to let them go if they are permanent.   He is a very hard worker as we have quite a large yard with a lot of trees, roses, and other flower beds.

The other day he climbed into a large tree in the back and started chopping off some branches—we thought he was just pruning it.   By the end of the day the tree had no branches and he was cutting the branches into pieces for firewood.  As we've said before it is very cold here and most people cut down whatever they can for firewood.   The next morning he had piled all the leaves at the base of the tree and was preparing to light the leaves on fire.  He was going to burn the base so the tree would fall down so he could cut it all for firewood.   The kids ran in to to tell us and Andy quickly went out and said to stop.  He was very apologetic about it all and stopped.  In talking to another missionary we were told that they will cut down everything in your yard if you let them. 

We had tried to contact our landlord to tell her what was happening but were unable to reach her.   She called later and when I explained what Dada Cheerwa had tried to do she said, "No problem."  I told her that we stopped him and she said that we can tell him to do whatever we want.   It didn't matter to her if he cut the tree down but if we didn't want him to then that was okay too.  The African ways are still a mystery to us.

Another interesting thing when you have house help is that your garbage is picked through and used by them.   Since there is no garbage service you burn everything but compost material.  They are to put the garbage in the burn pit but most things end up back on the driveway or are used as toys by the children.   I'll see their children using tomato sauce cans and peanut butter jars when they play.  They roll the cans down our driveway; when you have nothing you have to be creative.   I asked Jodi McGill to tell them to stop and she said they won't because they all do it. 

The family is moving out on Friday as our house help that is coming from LLW will arrive on Friday and will move into the servant's quarters.   Their names are also Dada and Mama Cheerwa.  I guess we'll have Dada 1 and Dada 2.