Soul Food

I read the other day that my baby is practicing swallowing. He or she is sipping away on his or her amniotic fluid (yum) and, most interesting to me, while working out all those developing esophagus muscles he or she is also getting a tasty sampling of everything I am eating. That’s right. Baby is tasting everything I am tasting (albeit with a distinct hint of amniotic fluid flavor I suspect). This thought amused me the other day as I reflected on the assortment of culinary oddities I have been passing on.

One of the few items in our house that treads the fine line between luxury and necessity, thus earning it a place between layers of underwear in our 15-kilo bags on bush planes carrying us back from East Africa, is nam-pla, a fishy sauce from Thailand that pervaded the kitchen of my Bangkok-raised mother throughout my childhood. And now, even though I have spent no more than a week or so in Thailand in the course of my own life, at least once a week my own little kitchen in the middle of arid North Africa is filled with the balmy smells of limes, hot peppers, garlic, coconut milk and onions all delicately strung together with salty nam-pla rationed out greedily from a tall glass bottle. And when I sit down to a steaming bowl of neu-pat-prik tumbling over a mountain of white rice, I imagine my unborn child smacking his or her lips and daydreaming about the summers he or she will spend savoring curries at his maternal grandmother’s kitchen table.

But my mother-in-law has been here with us for the past couple of weeks and the smells emanating from my little kitchen have plucked me right out of tropical Asia and plopped me into the heart of the humid antebellum South. The mouth watering stench of turnip greens bubbles from a huge pot on my gas stove supported gently by the buttery warm scent of baking cornbread. Black-eyed peas are soaking in a pot on the floor nearbye. And when I sit down to a glass off ice-cold sweet tea and a bowl of salty wet boiled peanuts (“bolled” I’ve been informed, not “boi-led”) I imagine my baby savoring that taste of Georgia and daydreaming of the Easter Sundays he or she will spend at his paternal grandmother’s house stealing spoonfuls of purple-hull peas.

When I eat these foods I feel like I am doing more than just getting full. I feel like am ingesting memories and emotions and traditions. I am eating a heritage. And I wonder if my baby can taste those things too - the complex beauty of one, the warm comfort of the other. Bitefuls of the people who already love him or her so much.

Yesterday afternoon I felt the baby kick for the first time. Not just a suspicious swish or a vague bubble-burst like I have been. I felt an all-out kick, a tiny heel shoved into the palm of my hand resting just right of my belly button. And it made me smile. Which one was it, Baby? The green guava dipped in sugar and hot pepper or the leftover piece of pecan pie?

French Toast Breakfast

We ran into one of the officials from the local government office on Tuesday at the airstrip when Bryan and Mama Dona flew home. Seeing our happy reunion, and no doubt considering the Eid celebrations ahead, the official told us not to worry about registering Mama Dona officially at his office that week. “I’ll just come by the house to get her name and paperwork tomorrow,” he said and waved us off.

He popped in the next morning as we were finishing up a jet-lagged breakfast amidst the detritus of new clothing tags and stray Starburst wrappers. As Bryan went to fetch her travel documents (“legal” travel here is still carried out under a rebel movement stamp of approval), Mama Dona welcomed our government official friend to a plate of French toast and a cup of tea, her big Southern hospitality both jutting oddly out of place and yet simultaneously melting in perfectly. As the official carefully worked the sticky slices onto his fork my mother-in-law began to ask him questions. What is your name? Where is your home? What is your language? How many languages do you speak? Her happy curiosity about this new part of the world spilled out in an eagerness to learn as much as she could all before breakfast was over. Each question was answered concisely in concentrated English, though often accompanied with a subtle smile. At one point, after lamenting the fact that her babies have chosen to live so far away, Mama Dona patted Bryan’s hand lovingly and pointedly asked our guest, “Now where does your mother live?” The official swallowed the bite in his mouth and then answered matter-of-factly, “My mother was shot during the war when all of our people were trying to run across the border.” Bryan and I exchanged glances while Mama Dona took this new information in. “Oh. And how old were you when this happened?”
“I was eleven.”

“I…I’m so very, very sorry.”

There was a moment’s silence and then Bryan explained that our guest had spent almost twenty years in a refugee camp and had only returned to his childhood home a few years ago, when the peace agreement was signed. “But I was very lucky.” Our guest went on casually, wiping his face with a napkin and giving the travel documents a cursory glance. “I learned English there and received an education. Now I have this job.”

Bryan eventually walked our guest back out to his motorcycle at the gate and I begin stacking up syrupy plates. Mama Dona stayed sitting in her chair at the table and then said in a voice as monotone as the departing official’s, “Okay, I am going to have a good cry now.” She then picked up a paper napkin, delicately unfolded it, put it to her face and began to sob. I put down the dishes I was holding and wrapped my arms around her, a few of my own tears sliding into her silver blond hair. Through her fingers I heard a mumbled “Oh God why? He was only eleven…” and then later, “I knew this happened. We all knew it was happening but it was so far away.”

We sat like that for a while. And I watched as many of the emotions I have experienced in the past year and a half – the guilt and grief and gratitude – all bound themselves up in one conversation, one face, and one story all around my table in one morning over breakfast.  

   

Greek

Thing 57 that I like about living here: the frequency with which simply grocery shopping intersects with sheer unexpectedness.

Often it’s a newly available product. It may be grapes or it might be goat heads. Each is equally unexpected in its own way.  Other times it’s an unexpected event. The local crazy woman gets in a fight with the local crazy man and you duck behind a mound of potatoes to avoid being hit in the head by a flying rock. Some days it’s just the weather. A surprise thunderstorm, freak wildfire or sudden dust storm creeps up without warning. You just never know if your trip to the market is going to a regular ol’ stroll through outdoor aisles of cabbages and tomatoes or something brand new that you walk away from saying, “Well, I have never seen (smelled, tasted, felt, heard etc.) that before.”

A few days ago my meeting with unexpectedness came in the form of a person.

I first noticed him while I was assessing cucumbers at my favorite vegetable stall. He was on the far end of middle aged, short, heavy set and dark haired. I couldn’t see his face but his arms and profile were dark brown – much fairer than most people in the market and much darker than me – “normal colored” as Bryan and I like to say, using a somewhat un-academic term for the complexion of most of the world, as first introduced to us by a Central Asian friend. Someone could have easily convinced me that the man in the market was a citizen of anywhere from Morocco to Mexico and many places inbetween. I had never seen him before and he didn’t seem terribly familiar with the market, though he certainly wasn’t completely out of his element. As I walked away I heard him speaking to the vendor in flawless Arabic.

A few minutes later at the bread stand the stranger passed by again and this time we made eye contact. A Khawajia in a head scarf is of occasional interest to non-locals so I wasn’t terribly surprised when he waved and turned towards me. As he approached I made a quick scroll through my mental rolodex of categories of people in this area, his loud English greeting narrowing my quick search. UN affiliate? Flip-flops and a light button-down shirt that looked well hand-washed: Probably not. Businessman from the North? Gaudy jade crucifix dangling around his neck: Unlikely. Very, very lost tourist? (Insert new category into rolodex) Effortless navigation of language and goats in the road: No. As he shook my hand warmly and started into an overflow of friendly questions well-seasoned in an accent I couldn’t quite place, I was drawing a blank. Who was this guy and what was he doing out here?

After I satisfied his similar questions with a brief introduction, he returned the favor with gusto. “My name is Antonio. I am ethnically Greek,” he said proudly, as the accent I now recognized from a movie about a wedding clicked into place, “but” he continued with equal pride, “I am a national of this country!” My expression must have shown the mix of the confusion and interest I felt because for the next five minutes in the middle of the sandy road, he colorfully narrated a very condensed version of a fascinating story, pieces of which I had already heard from locals but had only chalked up to urban legend, (or in this case, rather rural legend actually).      

The man I met in the market is the son of a Greek merchant who moved to this tiny town in the 1960s, right after the British, Egyptians and Italians had all been politely asked to leave the broader area. Why he chose to move here, I still don’t know, but he opened up a shop, built a house, dug a well, raised a bunch of kids and eventually died and was buried just down the road. His kids grew up, moved a few miles away to the state capital, got married, built homes, opened up shops and are now raising kids and grandkids of their own. And on this particular day, I stood talking to one of those sons who had returned to the town of his birth to visit his father’s grave. Of all the people I might have imagined this man to be, it wasn’t a Greek North African coming back to visit his roots.

This man’s passport, memories, livelihood and family are all inextricably linked to this part of the world. I wonder how often he has been to Greece, if ever. Though he stands out, this country is his home like nowhere else in the world. But as he said goodbye he cradled my hand in both of his, smiled as greasily as his hair and said warmly, “I’ll be in town for a while. We should get together for a beer!” and I realized that, however North African we may turn out to be in the end, the influence of our fathers’ homelands doesn’t go away quickly. (Good naturedly inviting a married woman twenty years your junior to share a drink in an Islamic society just somehow seemed very…Greek at that moment.)   

I have seen this man in town a couple of times since that day though we haven’t spoken again. He is usually sitting with other shopkeepers and seems to be deep in conversation each time. I imagine they are talking about how this town has changed in the last fifty years and I would love to sit down and eavesdrop. But I just keep walking and think of the questions I would love to ask him if we ever do run into each other again. Like: What was it like to live here as a kid? Do you eat mussaka (sp?) or kisra at home, or both? Do your kids speak Greek? What do you think about the politics of this country? Does the well your father dug still have water in it?

What a fascinating world we live in. I love meeting people whose stories and experiences I would never have imagined up myself, people who don’t quite fit any category I’ve come up with yet. I love having to constantly add new entries to that mental rolodex of mine.

November

Stepping out of October and into November has felt like shrugging off the light cotton sundress you wear to spring picnics and pulling on that scratchy sweater that has been stuffed in an old trunk all year. Almost overnight the once cloudy skies have been bleached a dirty white and our cool mornings and evenings have been replaced with oppressive heat. Right on cue, the tall grass and lush leaves are all turning yellow-brown and the mosquitoes are in one last feeding frenzy before they die out with the evaporating puddles. Ash sifts through the air and settles on our laundry and drying dishes while the horizons burn with feral bush fires. My garden only has a few days of produce left, and everything I pick comes pre-cooked: my basil leaves are steamed on the bush; my carrots are baked before they come out of the ground; and my cherry tomatoes feel boiled on the vine. As vividly as I remember the intensity of the dry season last year, the sheer greenness of the rains washed all memory of the experience from my physical body which is responding like it has never been through this before. And as recent as the rains were, after only a week of their absence they already seem like a distant dream. It is amazing how quickly things change here. I can't believe I ever used to heat up my bath water.

Bryan is leaving for a week tomorrow – first to the Southern capital to work on government documents and then on to East Africa to pick up his mother who is coming for a visit. We are so excited about her upcoming visit. She is the first member of our immediate family to come here and we are so excited to introduce someone we love so much to other things we have come to love so much. We are not without trepidation though. North Africa could be considered an acquired taste and this is her first trip to the continent. Bucket baths and lizards may not be as charming in real life as they sound in emails. I am proud of my mother-in-law already though, even if this adventure turns out to be a bust. She is the least likely candidate in our families to come visit us in the middle of nowhere Africa at the beginning of dry season a month before a political brouhaha that could result in the world's newest nation. She isn't the mother who grew up overseas or the sister who wants to be a doctor in Congo. She isn't the father who served two tours in Vietnam or the sister who runs half-marathons. She is the retired math teacher from Georgia who loves her diet coke, is a little bit overweight, and is having a hard time leaving her hair curlers behind. She is nervous about the lack of air conditioning, sleeping under a thatch roof and trying out the sorghum and okra. And to be honest so am I, a little bit.

But a week from Thursday, she is stepping on that trans-Atlantic flight with a bag full of sunscreen and mosquito repellant (and if I know her at all, good things for us) and is coming to see her babies. And that, my friends, is true love. She has heart as big as the wildfire that will consume the hill behind our house any day now and a capacity for loving people regardless of who they are that I believe will overcome the overwhelming newness of life here. There will be hard days, but in many ways I think I may discover that she may not turn out to be as "unlikely" as I once expected. (And on the slim chance that I am dead wrong we will finish off the whole party with a safari and beach holiday in East Africa….)

The next few weeks will be an adventure for us all, one I am quite excited about. Mama Dona, we can't wait to see you!

A Night in the Life…

After we clean up the dishes from supper together, I go get our pajamas out of the tent and spray it for mosquitoes while Bryan fills up our water filter with a bucket from the tank under our rain gutters. I then take the big kettle of hot water off the stove and carry it to the shower while Bryan fills up our bath buckets with water. In a few months (weeks?) when the rains finally stop and our tanks our full of brackish water from the hafira I will miss this cold clean rain every night. But tonight I just enjoy being able to see all the way to the bottom of my bucket. We top off our buckets with steaming water from the kettle and lather up under what we pour over ourselves from metal cups. We talk while we bathe - about our day, the new word we learned, our families, or lately, what our baby will be like. I sometimes forget that there was a time when bathing together out of buckets was not a part of ordinary life. And I think I will miss it when the time comes that it no longer is. When we finish we shake out our towels left hanging up from last night. More than once we have found small black scorpions hiding out under the damp cloth, but there are none tonight. Once Bryan didn't shake out his towel first and a startled six-inch skink made a panicked dash across his wet body. My hysterical laughter (and helpful attempt to stay as far away as possible) didn't help the matter much that night and we now keep a big stick in the corner of the shower – ready for use on the day those seeking sanctuary in our towels are a little more menacing than lizards.

Clean and clothed, we brush our teeth outside, spitting white foam into the dark bushes off the path and rinsing out of a big bottle of filtered water. Glancing up while I brush I see high clouds pressed thin against the swollen darkness of the sky, like cotton pulled apart by inexpert fingers; but the stars that do push through the bare spaces are pale and timid tonight. We close up all the windows in the house in case of rain, pat the head of the white shadow in the dark with the wagging tail and zip ourselves up in the tent for the night. After we flip off the inverter everything on our compound is dark except for the door-shaped glow of a lantern coming from the hut near the gate where our guard stays. I think I can catch fragments of voices still coming from his radio but other than this, the only sound is the low drone of the generator next door and the far off squabble of wild dogs. The night is cool enough still to snuggle under my grandmother's sun-faded quilt and fall asleep close to my husband.

When I wake up I can tell I have been asleep several hours by the silence of the generator and the pressure in my bladder. I lie still for a moment wondering what woke me. I hear a low growl from our tent porch and then a snort and rustle in the grass behind our fence line. Asad barks a few times and the nosey donkeys huff in an irritated manner and continue their midnight grazing somewhere further down the path. Fully awake now I swing my legs out of bed and reach for my headlamp. Bryan stirs and I ask if he needs to go too. He mumbles incoherently then groggily slips on his crocs and grabs his own flashlight. As I stoop to unzip our door I hear the creak of tiny footsteps on our canvas roof overhead followed by a curious mew. When we are both outside, Nimir springs lightly from his comfortable perch on top of our tent and follows us down the path to the bathroom. In the dark, he is completely invisible unless our lights hit his green eyes.

When I am finished and waiting for Bryan I glance back up at the night sky. The clouds have disappeared by now and the stars gleam like they were embedded in newly polished glass. The Milky Way stretches boldly across the sky, arching her spine like a diver springing backwards across a dark pool of water. I am almost amazed to have been sleeping through such beauty. As we walk back to bed Nimir pads silently along beside us. When we reach the tent he springs back up to his canvas hammock over our heads and we step inside and collapse back into bed. Often I fall back asleep in moments, but tonight the cool air and bright stars have roused my mind and I lie awake for a while. I hear Bryan sniff and think he is probably awake too but we both lie silent. A tinker bird chirps from a tree on the hill behind our house. I listen for the bush baby we have only occasionally hear chirping from the hill too, but she is quiet tonight.

I eventually resort to mere counting, my brain too interested to be lulled by anything less dull and I eventually loose count around 350. The next thing I am aware of is Mama Hen squawking to be let loose from her hen house and the pleasant twangs from our guard's radio. The bulge in the canvas above my head stretches lazily and I roll over. Outside my window the morning is grey and still damp in its newness.

Animal Crackers

Recently a box of goodies arrived on the bush plane that flies in every two weeks with my name on it, sent from a dear friend far away. It was full of goodies from the States, mostly snacks that helped her get through morning sickness a few months prior and that she thought I too might enjoy. Needless to say, they were worth their weight in gold, and I have carried out a delicate dance between hoarding them Gollum-like (my precious) and savoring them with all the restraint of a kid going through her stocking on Christmas morning. And yet, as amazingly crunchy as the honey mini-wheats were for breakfast and the little goldfish crackers were for mid-morning, mid-afternoon and mid-evening snacks, I may have derived the most pleasure from this whole experience by simply inhaling the fragrance of the contents of the cardboard box right after I opened it. It smelled like America. Mmmm....

Last week I took a little baggy of the treasured animal crackers that came in the box with me to our language lesson and munched on a few while conjugating active participles. (I know, only a pregnant lady could have kept her appetite through that.) I absently mindedly shared a few with our language helper and the old man who tends the grounds at the school where we meet. Fairly soon our lesson had digressed from Arabic grammar to a lengthy discussion about the animal crackers.

"What are these?" the older man asked. Proud to know the words for both "animal" and "biscuit" I informed them that they were "animal biscuits" from America.
"These are animals?"
"Yeah. Animals."
He picked up a cookie, held it up to the light and squinted for closer inspection. "Well, what is this one?"
"That one? Let's see...that one is a...um....well, that's a bison."
"A what?"
"It's like a hairy American cow. Nevermind. Let's look at another one."
"Okay, what is this one?"
"This one is....uh...crud. This one is a bear. "
"A what?"
"A bear. It walks on four legs, but can stand up on two. It's really mean."
"Oh, you mean a lion."
"No, no, not a lion. I don't think you have bears here."
"Does it climb trees?"
"Uh, sometimes."
"It's a lion."
"No....not a lion..."
"Does it eat people?"
"Yeeeah...
"It's called a lion. Li-on."
"Well, maybe sorta like an American lion. Let's look at another one."

The subsequent zoological research into the cookies resulted in several bison, a family of bears, a herd of deer, a couple horses, a potential llama and one very North American looking sheep. It was with great excitment that we eventually identified a camel. Eventually the name-that-animal game just turned into some serious snacking. At one point our language helper said with his mouth full of bison, "These are delicious. They don't make biscuits like these here. They make good animal biscuits in America." So at the end of the day I guess it was decided that ethnocentric cookies are pretty good after all.

The mystery animal. Any guesses?

Real

Sometimes this blog is hard to write. The words I most often find myself wanting to put down are descriptions of this beautiful world as I discover it day by day. I want to write about people and places and experiences that are completely new and exciting or charming. But even to me my thoughts sometimes read like romanticized daydreams right from the pages of an Isak Dinesen short story or the delusional monologues of a cross-cultural junkie in the throes of honeymoon stage culture shock. I don't mean for everything here to sound beautiful. It isn't. (But maybe you are laughing as you read this because to you my words most often describe a place you would like to visit right after your summer holiday in Mogadishu, and stories of soldiers, monitor lizards and simply dreadful heat are all just really, really depressing. If that's the case, than this particular blog entry is not meant for you. Just skip it and come back next week.) Whatever the case may be, sometimes I worry that I will do my current home a disservice by most often writing about its good aspects – all those things that are legitimately beautiful or gracious or interesting. But places that are only beautiful are not usually real. And more than anything, I want my blog to make this place feel real.

On our trip to the state capital last week I got manhandled. I was perusing a scarf shop alone when the very friendly owner helped himself to a handful of the one up-side to pregnancy so far (and no, I don't mean a glowing complexion) and though I initially (naively) attributed the incident to an unfortunate close-proximity folding accident, when it happened again I lay the overpriced item down and walked out in a huff. The incident bothered me and for a little while I couldn't stop thinking about it. Was I overacting? Was I under-reacting? I don't know how I would handle the situation in my own culture much less someone else's. All I knew is that I hated being taken advantage of because of the idea that all women by themselves are just inviting trouble. And I really hated being taken advantage of because of the assumption that all Western women are incredibly loose anyway so why should she really mind?

I tell you this not to make you upset for me or to reinforce some silly stereotype. I do it for quite the opposite reason. I want you to know that this place and the people who live here are real. They are jerks and opportunists and bigots, just like everywhere else. Remember that. But remember that so that when you hear me write about the old, very traditional man who buys our tea after we hardly do more than greet him respectfully, you will know that that too is real. When you read about the road engineer who gives us a truckload of gravel to build our garage for free just because he appreciates that we moved here to try to help in some small way, know that is real. The women who insist on sharing their only meal of the day though it's hardly enough for them and their kids and our friend who runs a local school even though half his students can't pay a dime are real. People here are selfless, forgiving and hospitable beyond belief. They are so achingly real.

I went to town alone today alone and bought some material to make pillowcases for my couch. Beyond the usual greetings and bargaining no one said or did anything really out of the ordinary. No one except maybe the male shopkeeper who came up to me unbidden and insisted that I take a handful of his dates from his breakfast plate. Day after day, for good or bad, I am overwhelmed by the realness of this place.