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In this country of rice and palm oil, we are unable today to buy either. Our boys complain continually of being on short rations and we shared our own supply of rice with them - not that it went very far among so many.

We are objects of great curiosity in the village, and the inhabitants hang around our kitchen constantly, pressing in so close that we are constantly asking them to move because they "lock the breeze." We tried out chewing gum on Tetemeh, with the instructions "Chew him all day, when the sun go down you waste him". One very ancient dame remembers two white men having stayed in Belleyella but never a white woman.

J and I were very pleased when Dunbar, Bill's personal boy, brought us a lovely bunch of white, sweet-smelling lilies. However, this was followed up by a note asking us to sell him six cents' worth of cigarettes.

Heavy rain fell in the eveing, but the roof of our kitchen was well thatched, and we were very cosy with our bright pressure lamp burning. The long-awaited District Commissioner is rumored to have arrived.

March 27 - 

We are constantly being surprised at the virility of these people, who have no knowledge at all of the simplest rules of hygiene. Most of them are well built, little evidence of rickets, and except for skin diseases seem in good health. In Belleyella there is a paralytic, who once a day crawls about the village on hands and knees. One very old woman , holding one hand on her back, walks slowly with a cane, and calls on us every day. She is incredibly wrinkled, with grey hair and long flabby breasts that hang to her waist.

The Commissioner, Robertson Clark, is in town, and what a difference it makes! Brisk and business-like, he orders the lazy drunken town chief around, and gives orders to the women to bring us all the small fish they catch in their nets. He arranges for a series of cotton pictures, women cleaning the bolls, and spinning, and a weaver at a loom. The Commissioner tells us that we have been suspected of being missionaries, and the people didn't want to have anything to do with us.

March 28 - Bill and I went bug hunting, and he was delighted to get nine myrmecophiles in two columns of driver ants. Si went hunting and returned with two dead monkeys, and a baby r ed colobus that has been shot, but he thinks he can save it.

In the afternoon J and I went to see Tetemah in her hut. She is the head of the Grigri bush, the most powerful woman in town, and this is the woman's medicine house - no men allowed near it. Bill asked if he couldn't come with us, and she said "No. He could come alone but only to sleep". The interior of her one-room hut was black with the smoke of many fires; over the logs that were slowly burning hung bags of food and medicine; the dancing girls' gourds and raffia decorations were hung on the walls. An ancient dame sat in the center of the floor spinning. Conversation lagged, as Tetenah knows