The Mill

I had another "that was my first time" experience today. We are preparing for the Annual Women's Meeting here in Nyimba. Each area of churches is gathering maize to make their mealie meal in order to eat at the meeting! One of the zones is very far away and they sent two 50 kg bags of maize with Kendall yesterday after his time of teaching in their zone. This morning, I decided that we needed to go ahead and take it to the "chigayo" or mill to make it into mealie meal (cornmeal). And this is how it went, we paid 15,000 Zambian Kwacha which is $3.00 to mill both bags.

First, the maize was dumped into a huge drum that was laying horizontally. Then water was poured into the maize and rinsed. This man then poured it into the large filter at the top and began to grind it into smaller chunks. The green bag to his left is one completed bag of our maize.

Then our two bags of maize that had been ground waited in line to be put through the milling machine that makes it into mealie meal or cornmeal.

These two men were repairing the other milling machine that was broken. The large spout you see on the left is where the finished product comes out into the bag that is below.

The two men then took our maize and placed it in a large basket that we put by the bowlful into the miller. As you can tell, I didn't take any pictures while we did it because we got dirty! There are so many bees inside the mill too because the smell is quite sweet! 

I was so proud of our 2 1/4 bags of mealie meal! Kendall just laughed when he saw how dirty we had gotten in the mill! It was another great cultural experience!