Our third stop was the Diki Village. This village has about 5,500 to 6,000 residents. The village is big, open, and sparse. Each unit is a homestead or family compound with multiple houses and outbuildings. The units are far apart from each other as well as far apart from the stores, schools, and everything else. Space is not a problem here as they seemed to have plenty of room for everyone. It was a low-density village but everything is within walking distance. This village is the Mpala Tribe.

The man in the middle is the Head Man or village chief. He told us that his position as chief was inherited and that he is not elected. He told us that the Diki Village is a privileged village because it has a water system, schools, a medical clinic, and more. His head man job is to solve disputes and run a Kangaroo Court under the village Baobab Tree. I think he also organizes major projects for the village. His main problems are malaria, drought, and wild animals. He said the wild animal problems include elephants destroying the crops and the predators (lions and leopards) killing stock animals or people.

Men in the Diki Village do the heavy work which is building structures, digging, hauling logs and rocks, and protecting their livestock from predators. Women do everything else. Women fetch water, cook food, take care of the children and school, work at growing crops, pound the millet, do laundry, and so on.

The building behind the head man is a typical building in southern Africa. The head man’s homestead does not have any electricity. They also do not have any eating utensils and eat all their food with their hands.

The house on the left is the head man’s house. In the center is the girl’s bedroom. The small building on the right is their tool shed. If you look between the houses and off into the distance, you can see the nearest homestead. The homesteads do not abut one another, but rather have a substantial amount of space between them.

The third photo is looking right of the first photo and left of the second photo. In this photo, the main building is the summer kitchen which is where we spent most of our two and a half hours visiting time here. To the left of the summer kitchen is a chicken coop, stock animal pens (where the animals stay at night), and some kind of a utility area.

This is the winter kitchen. It’s a lot nicer than many third-world kitchens we’ve seen but there really isn’t much to it. They did cook us some snack food here. They cooked us some Mopani (moth) worms. These worms were originally larvae about the size of my index finger but they cook them down to about gummy worm size. The Mopani worms were well seasoned and had a consistency about like beef jerky. They also served us tea and some dried Baobab fruit which had kind of a citrus taste.

This was our grand finale. Only some of these women are from the head man’s family. Many others are from his village but came over for our visit. Our tour group put together a gift of food that we purchased in town at the OK Market. You can see some of our gift in a basket on the ground. We bought things like bags of rice. The women all danced around and sang “Tawuka Kasa” to us for quite a while. You miss a lot not being able to hear all the singing in southern Africa.