Going Green!!

People have often asked us what our biggest adjustments have been to our life back in America after living in Malawi.  No doubt it was a life changing experience, but sometimes it is hard to know or explain how it has affected us.  One of the first things that comes to my mind is wastefulness and resourcefulness.  

I will always remember an incident at our host family's home when I gave a small empty peanut butter jar to our host mom to throw away and the next day it reappeared with our meal as a salt shaker.  On a Peace Corps budget we quickly learned how to be resourceful ourselves.  One of my favorites was our homemade wine and "stemless" wine glasses that were actually small jars I had collected from ex-patriots living in the city.  We also had to learn how to deal with our waste.  Anything organic we composted.  Anything paper we burned.  Anything plastic we tried to reuse, threw down our chimbudzi (pit latrine) or burned (which we hated doing).  We also only ate what was in season and locally available.  Not that we had much of a choice in that matter, but it forced us to get creative with our cooking and to appreciate the work it took to grow the food we were eating.  

Now that we are back in America, being resourceful and less wasteful is a much bigger challenge, but every little thing we do makes us feel better and helps us to bring our Peace Corps experience home.  Here are a few of the things we have been up to:

We get a share of vegetables from a Community Supported Agriculture farm called Common Harvest in Osceola, WI.  We actually split a share with a our neighbors and take turns picking it up in our neighborhood every week.  They email us recipes, too.  It has been a lot of fun to try out new recipes and vegetables.

The other thing that I really wanted to use was cloth diapers.  This took a lot of research to figure out which route we wanted to go.  The best analogy I heard was that cloth diapers are kind of like jeans.  No one diaper works best for all babies or families.  We have gone with a brand called SoftBums.  I liked them because they can fit from 6-35lbs and have these little toggles in the legs that can adjust to different leg sizes.  Perfect for a preemie!  The best part is that they are made in Minnesota!  Here is a picture of them drying out on the line, which is also new.  We don't line dry them all the time because it does take a lot of time, but the best way to get poop stains out is by sunning them.  Crazy, huh?  I suppose blogging about this actually holds me accountable to sticking with the cloth diapers.  

And just in case you forgot how cute Ingrid is, here is a picture of her sporting her SoftBums.