Greetings!
All right let's dive in and get it over with. You knew it was bound to come, I guess I knew it was bound to be an issue but didn't want to believe it let alone understand what it as a problem really means, food.
Life force, energy, sugar, calories. Can't live without it. Literally.
In the small kitchen mud hut you'll see a couple piles of ash collected within the triangle of stones used to hold up the aluminum cooking pots. In another corner are dishes, maybe some fire wood, another corner holds the clay pot that stores the water. Up top a metal bowl with a lid holds some ingredients, some course salt, likely mined from the brackish part of the river, maybe some onions and dried fish.
In my host fathers hut is the bag of rice, coos, ground nuts, and pot of local peanut butter. These, the above, and jumbo (chicken bouillon) cubes are just about the main ingredients to any dish. Making things a bit more fancy/tasty, costing a bit more money unless you are fortunate to be able to grow them yourself, are the local vegetables: carrot, cabbage, potato, sweet potato, cassava, beans, tomato, bitter tomato (a relative of egg plant), egg plant (commonly called garden egg), okra, squash, pumpkin, and that famous hot hot pepper. Also leaves from sorrel, baobab, and moringa.
Lunch: (will try to add pics at a later date!)
One of the most common dishes right now is domada/mafet. A fresh ground nut sauce made with local peanut butter, tomato paste, jumbo, onion, garlic, water, and typically dried boney fish, served atop a bed of steaming fresh white rice. Prepared well this is one of my favorite dishes. When the sauce is rich and local vegetables can be found within, and dried boney fish not found within, this dish is delicious. More common in village and up country, the sauce is weak and watered down and extremely fishy and salty. Also, commonly, it's just not available in copious amounts to fill everyone's belly, or at least to fill mine.
Dinner: Mbaxal orYangkaton (depending on your tribe)
Another simple and common dish. The ground nuts are pounded but not too fine, not too course. Rice is cooked. The fresh ground groundnuts are added as well as the dried boney fish, bouillon cubes, salt, and maybe onion and all mixed together. Again I like this much more when the fish doesn't find it's way in. But even so it's good. Even better with fresh lime and hot pepper to add for flavor. But even hot pepper can be hard to come by at times, let alone fresh lime.
These two dishes complemented with the breakfast bars my family sent me is what I've been subsisting off of solely for about a month. Until recently I was able to add to my regimen rice from the school food bowl. There they cook bennechin every day except Friday when they cook yellow split peas with onion and oil. Bennechin: rice, oil, onion, jumbo, and salt.
And then the school ran out of their WFP (World Food Program) rice.
The common theme is the 'shocking' absence of vegetables. Vegetables and leaves do find their way in seasonally. But all the above mentioned dishes and breakfast bars just somehow wasn't enough to keep me healthy nor enough to fight off infection or stave off the cold.
Then my gas ran out. It was out in the neighboring town and in low quantity next nearest me in Senegal. Oily pasta and Parmesan cheese couldn't come to the rescue. Nor could vegetable noodle soup, oatmeal, or soya macaroni. My standard staples when I can cook. I was slipping. My cold relapsed. The market stubbornly remained stationary some 12 km away. I was too tired or sick to make the 24 k round trip journey. Vegetable gardens in the community remained stubbornly dried out and unproductive. Depression, frustration, and apathy settled in along with the cold nights (my blanket was some 140km further up country left at a friends site after a bee keeping training)...
My kitten was happy and plump though. She had fish heads and scraps to eat on a pretty regular basis. And though she turns her nose up to the rice initially, after realizing that's all we got, she'll pretty much finish her handful offered by the family before the next handful or two comes.
So Peace Corps had me come on in, eat some food, take even more antibiotics, and get back on my feet. Pizza, homemade chicken noodle soup, apple pie, hot chocolate, r&r and wonderful friends to the rescue.
The hardest thing with the food is that we do have it, but what we have is somehow small and basic and is supposed to feed some ten people. My little brother will look up at the food bowl, lay back down as I start to dig in with my camping spork. Yura, doo lekka? Yura, you won't eat? Full. Bullsh*& I think to myself. But what do I know. Maybe he ate at another compound? It's so hard to gauge ages here because the malnutrition stunts growth and size substantially.
When this happened before the harvest, when we were just getting small bowls of coos (millet) flour and cold water to eat, and it was just me and some of my brothers eating, I would ask my sisters if they ate the next morning after finally mustering the courage to ask wondering if it was inappropriate as we don't really talk about food or hunger, ever. I was surprised to feel the stinging sensation strike my nose and eyes as I tried to fight back the tears as my words came out of my head, did you eat, and hearing my host sister tell me with a smile that she did not eat, she doesn't like coos/chere.
I have an out, always. It's called America or the United States of America (as there are more than one America). If I'm out of money and going hungry, someone will help me, PC, a fellow PCV, a teacher at the school. But this is their life. There is no out. There really isn't a McDonalds up the road or Taco Bell as much as I may fantasize. There are other compounds where all are always welcome and will always find an invitation to their food bowl.
But they are "used to it." As horrible as it sounds. It's the bit of solace I hold onto to make me feel better that it's likely they aren't 'suffering' or feeling as badly as I feel when the food just isn't quite enough. But it's one of those things I'll never really know as I doubt they'd ever really tell me.
The quality and quantity of the food bowl is correlated to the emotional rollercoaster of peace corps correlated to the emotional roller coaster of life. It has it's ups and downs. Some periods are better than others.
I'll be ok. As much as I hate the stereotype here that because I'm white I have money, it's true. And as long as you have money you can buy food. But what about them? What about them especially if food aid stops? Which is likely to happen at least eventually. Our rice is aid rice. It's one of the reasons we aren't eating our home grown millet because aid rice is available and they prefer it as it's held in higher prestige. Even though the millet is available in higher quantity and has more nutrients. But it's probably being saved for when aid rice is in smaller quantity.
This powerful book I nearly finished,
Two Ears of Corn: A people centered approach towards agricultural improvements by Roland Bunch with World Neighbors, emphasizes that one of the most powerful things you can do, is somehow get the people to believe in themselves. To believe that things could be better and that
they, not foreigners, can make it better. Most people of the developing world have been or are minorities that have been made to feel over the course of history that they are inferior and incapable of doing anything. If you believe it long enough it can become the truth. I think this is the situation we are dealing with and should be the angle we approach any form of community development anymore. There is a dependency now on foreign aid. If that dependency can be replaced with confidence achieved by seeing that yes they can produce more food and make more money if they space the corn like this or till the stalk in like that, a spiraling outward effect of "what else can we do" is likely to follow which is how development will actually occur. Like I said, it was a powerful book! It proposes a time frame of work that is substantially longer than Peace Corps (5-8 yrs) but gave me much 'food' for thought. Check out the organization
here if interested.
The moral of the story is if you want to help- stop giving things out. Hand outs aren't valued and are the opposite of useful. Give confidence. It's much harder to give but much more valuable!
Thank you again for all the continued love and support and care packages and letters! Jynene, Souse, B, Laura, Robert, Sarah, Brady, Mom, and Joe- they keep me goin! Love to all of you. And if you live in a climate that is conducive to this, take advantage! Grow what you eat and eat what you grow! Our motto around here. I'll have quite a few paces to walk with my 25L of water on my shoulder but am going to give dry season gardening a try here soon. Hot season okra here we come. Also am excited about the hot season mangoes that are already on their way!
Good food makes for good livin. Enjoy, savor, and if you really want to, send some this way ;-D
So much love!
