Let's Eat!

One of my favorite, unexpected things, about being a Peace Corps volunteer has been becoming a genuinely good cook.

Don't know how I survived this long without a working headlamp. So happy to have one! Thanks gammy.

 Probably from reading about the generally bland Basotho diet before coming here, I kind of thought I would be eating rice and beans feela (only) for the next two years. Thankfully, that has not turned out to be true. It helps that all the volunteers are supplied with a recipe book for ideas when we don’t want to make stew over and over, for example.

So, since I can’t cook for anyone back home yet, here are some recipes I’d highly recommend you try yourself.

And remember that 1) I’m cooking for one, but I usually make enough to have leftovers for a day or two at least 2) I like my food SPICY 3) Almost none of the measurements are exact. Cooking is, as they say, an art. Not a science.


Red Lentil Sauce

I put it on spaghetti, but it would probably also be good on fish or portabella mushrooms.

You need:
1 cup red lentils
1 onion, chopped
3 small tomatoes, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
Water
White vinegar
Salt
Pepper
Dried oregano and basil
Cayenne pepper
Any other spices you dig
White flour
A few spoonfuls or packets of tomato paste

In a small pot, cook lentils in 1 ½ cups of water. This will not take long.
When water is absorbed into lentils, add a few splashes of vinegar, the onion, tomato and pepper. Stir.
Add the tomato paste, some salt and pepper and about 2 cups of water (or less, depends how much sauce you want). Stir and cover.
Once some of the water has been absorbed, add copious amounts of basil and oregano and a few pinches of cayenne pepper. Also, more salt. Stir and cover again.
When you’re thinking, “damn this is taking a long time” add a few small handfuls of the flour, stir and cover. Also taste here and see if you need to add more spices. Stir and cover. Cook until it tastes tomato-y and it looks more like a sauce then like lentils sitting in water. Pour over whatever.

Lentil Potato Stew (This makes a lot. I was cooking for the week.)

You Need:
5 or 6 white potatoes (or sweet potatoes or squash), chopped into smallish pieces
2 cups of green or brown lentils
3-4 tomatoes
2-3carrots
A few huge handfuls of spinach/kale/rape/whatever leafy green you have around, chopped.
3 chili peppers, minced.
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced. (Or, garlic salt )
Salt
Pepper
Spices you dig. I think I put cayenne pepper, thyme, oregano, basil, cumin, curry powder and a garlic rosemary blend.

Put the potatoes, carrots and lentils in a medium-large pot with enough water to cover them. Cook until the lentils are cooked most of the way through.
While those guys are boiling, heat a healthy amount of oil in a large saucepan or a wok. Add the garlic, chili peppers, onions, tomatoes and spices. Stir around a bit and cover.
When the lentils are good, drain most of the water and add a bit of the water and the lentils, potatoes and carrots to the pan. Add the green stuff. Stir around and add more of the spices. Cover and cook until the potatoes are the soft, the green stuff is cooked down, and the tomatoes are shriveled to only a portion of what they used to be. Taste and add more spices as needed. Serve.

Steamed Bread

You Need:
A big ass pot, with water covering the bottom, about an inch (enough so the smaller pot is submerged a bit but still touching the bottom of the bigger one).

A smaller pot or pan, greased

Your favorite bread recipe
Or, you can use the recipe I always use:
3 cups flour (I always use wheat, but bread flour is probably better)
2 tsp of salt
2 tbsp of sugar
1 package of instant dry yeast
1 cup of warm water
*sometimes I add a tablespoon or two of margarine (real butter is like a unicorn here) and sometimes I don’t. It just makes it more, ya know, buttery (better).

Combine all ingredients except the water. If you’re putting the margarine/softened butter in, mash it in with a fork now.
Add the warm water bit by bit while you stir with your other hand. Add enough water so that the dough is manageable and not overly sticky.
Knead it/punch it down for 10 minutes or so. I like to blast Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” for this part.

Place in a greased bowl and let it rise for anywhere from 20-40 minutes, until it’s about double.
Place in the small pot/loaf pan. Put small pot directly into the big pot (don’t forget to add water to the big pot!).

Bake until a knife comes out clean, about 40 minutes.
DEVOUR.

Dumplings
I was feeling adventurous one night and decided to try this recipe from the Peace Corps cookbook. Make sure you use a metal spatula so they don’t fall apart a lil at the end like mine may or may not have.

For Wrappers You Need:
2 cups flour
pinch of salt
¾ cup just boiled water

To Make Wrappers:
Pour the flour on your work table and make a well in the center.
Pour the water continuously while stirring (as best you can-delicate balance between stirring and not burning your fingers here)
Once all the water is poured and stirred, knead the dough to bring it all together.
Knead the ball for two minutes. The dough should be nice and elastic-y.
Tightly seal in a plastic bag. This book says keep it anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. I did 45 minutes and it ended up being a nice consistency.
Form small balls about 2 in. in diameter and roll them out as thinly as possible using as little flower as possible.

The cookbook gives a recipe for a yellow split pea filling, but I don’t fuck with split peas so I made a spicy lentil, tomato, garlic thing instead. To make this,

You Need:
1 cup of green or brown lentils, cooked
2 small tomatoes, chopped.
2-3 cloves of garlic, diced.
2 onions, chopped
a small chili pepper or 2, diced
Soy sauce
Sugar
Corn Starch
Salt
Vinegar
Whatever spices ya dig, but definitely curry powder and cumin

In a large saucepan, heat oil.
Add onions, chili pepper(s) and some curry powder. Cook until onions are translucent.
Add garlic. Stir.
Add tomatoes and tomatoes. Turn heat to medium low and cover for a few minutes, until lentils are softened and combined a bit with everything else. May need to add a bit of water here.
Make a sauce with the soy sauce, salt, vinegar, sugar and corn starch (optional, only for thickening). Pour the sauce in the lentil mixture. Stir in. Taste and add whatever spices you want. Cover and cook till its all a softened, spicy unit.
When everything’s finished…
Place a scoop of lentil filling in the center of each wrapper and pinch it closed.

Place a bunch of dumplings in a pan with ½ inch of water.
Cover and boil until the water is gone (about 10 minutes but keep an eye on them)
Drizzle about a tablespoon of oil around the dumplings so the bottoms begin to fry.
Transfer them to a plate. (Where the metal spatula is crucial).
Dip in soy sauce and DEVOUR.

…But lets not make this a one-way exchange. Send me your favorite recipes too!

Khotso.

Also...

This is definitely someone's flag

post/pre-rain mist and storm clouds 

wildflowers, seen on a hike I took last weekend 

Really hard to see it, but I almost got to see the cattle-post, which is this lil house the herd boys stay in when they have to herd far away from home. But I tsamae'd (left) when a herd boy expressed his interest in having sex with me. Whoops. 

I did make it to the top of this peak. This is the view of the other side. 

Every Rose Has it's Thorn

This week my friend Thabo (I don’t call him by his American name so there’s no reason for you to) texted me, "Does it ever blow your mind how some days you’ll feel like rock bottom and the next you’re flying in the sky?"

In a word, yes. And that’s what this post is about: how quickly and dramatically my feelings can shift here, sometimes multiple times in a day.

One Saturday night a few weeks ago, my brother knocked on my door. After telling him to come in and asking him how he was, he responded, "I am not fine", and proceeded to tell me that he had just been walking from the grounds (what they call a soccer field here) with his friend when a group of boys had suddenly come out of the shadows and begun insulting them and beating them with sticks. Beating them on their backs, their heads and all over. He didn’t know who they were and didn’t know why they had beaten them, and he was obviously upset. Not crying but close to it, he lifted up his shirt to show me the marks on his skin. Immediately I went over to hug him, and he hugged me back in the way that boys and men who don’t get hugged very much do when they let their guard down.

We often eat dinner and watch movies together on the weekends, and that night I could feel his need for company profoundly. It was after seven already and I hadn’t started cooking, so he just sat at the table and we listened to the radio and I cooked. He wasn’t in a chatty mood and I was content to chop my veggies and sing along to the radio, and it was nice to experience that feeling of comfort in not speaking, and just being, with him. Eventually, the curry was finished and we sat down and watched "Forgetting Sarah Marshall", which is high up on my (long) list of rom-coms and he liked it a lot too. I was still thinking about what had happened to him as he was getting up to leave, and right before he left I said, "I’m sorry that happened to you." "I even forgot about it", he said with a smile and a little shrug, and left.

Last Sunday one of the high school students, the best friend of my runaway host sister, knocked on my door and asked me for help with a debate she had to do for her English class. I agreed to help her, and it was nice to sit outside in the sun and do my washing while I helped her formulate her ideas. Nice to feel useful and nice to have a visitor.

After we were done, the conversation turned to Polo, my 15-year-old host sister who ran away almost as soon as I got here and had just returned for a day only to run away again. I said something about how I was worried about her and hoped she wasn’t having sex with lots of people, mentioning something offhand about the high rate of HIV/AIDS here. Selinda responded, just as casually, by saying "Polo has it. She has the HIV". All of a sudden and all at once, my heart dropped, my stomach lurched and I felt like I was going to cry. I didn’t, but I continued to feel this sense of hopelessness as she told me how Polo had been running away since she was 12, how she never listened when her friends told her to be careful and stay here and how she was probably not taking her ARV’s. But there was nothing to do in that moment except finish my washing and wave goodbye when she said she had to leave.

Last week my school gave a welcome lunch for me complete with chicken (meat!) and Tassenberg (Classy Tassy), the cheap dry red wine of choice for volunteers and Basotho alike.

Go head 'm'e

 It was really sweet of them, and they even gave me another Seshoeshoe.

Well, not wearing this at home

Naturally, the meal was supposed to start around 12 and actually started around 2, so we were all famished and sat around chatting and having a merry time for a while after we were done eating. All of a sudden, the mood was broken when a student came running up to the entrance of the office, crying so hysterically that she fell to her knees, saying that another student had beat her when she was walking home ("beat" doesn’t just mean an ass-whooping here. It’s the catch-all English word for physical violence). In the moment, the teachers just comforted her and told her to go home and they would deal with it tomorrow. And the next day when both girls were called to the office to sort it out, the other teachers brought up the history of terrible abuse that the girl who had done the beating had, saying, "we know why you ran away. We know you were hurt. We know that’s why you came to this school", and questioned to each other why she would beat another person. And in my head I was just thinking about how you can never assume that what seems obvious to you is obvious to everyone. The teachers didn’t bring her history of abuse in front of a roomful of people because they are insensitive people, but because a) there is hardly any value placed on privacy here and b) very little knowledge of the relationship between how one’s experiences affect what they do e.g. people who are hit are more likely to hit others.

And a few days ago, I was exhausted after a long day typical of what my long days are like here: The grade 5’s had been extremely rowdy during an activity and I was forced to stop the activity and give them boring sentence writing work after trying a multitude of things to get them to pay attention. The grade 4 boys were even harder to engage than usual, and I was feeling the absence of the grade 6 teacher (she left at the end of last week for a job with the ministry of education). I also got the lowdown from the other teachers about how my school principal didn’t prepare for that loss at all (they knew it was coming) or for the quickly approaching maternity leave that the grade 7 teacher would be on. There are no substitutes in the works and certainly no one permanent, I and began to realize that she’s not a very good principal at all. So I was feeling down about all of that and thinking about how much she is failing the grade 7 students, some of whom are already in their late teens, who will take crucial, future-deciding exams at the end of the year, and the grade 6 students, who will next year, by not preparing for these eventualities earlier. And then about all of the ways that the larger school system fails them (sound familiar, America?). So I decided to play some music out of my phone on my walk back, and just like that, 6 pre-teen girls were dancing and walking in step to the Backstreet Boys right along with me. And I was laughing and smiling right along with them.

Also, I sprained my ankle (again) on Sunday. On the down side, my ankle is sprained and I’m off aerobic activity for a bit. But on the upside, I ate a melted iced guava (like a popsicle in a pouch) every day last week, which I was using as an ice pack. (I know it’s hard for all you East-Coasters reading this to imagine a popsicle being an enjoyable thing right now, but it’s real treat in this other side of the world heat I’m experiencing.)

More often than not, I can’t control these things. I can’t make Polo stop running away or take her ARV’s. I can’t reverse the bad decisions that my principal made in the past. I can’t make Basotho value privacy more (nor would I want to). And, try as I might to be less clutzy, that particular trait of mine seems to be a pretty permanent one.

I’m still a generally happy person, but on any given day I am genuinely and sometimes extremely angry, saddened, frustrated, bewildered or what have you. What I’m learning how to do is to both let myself feel whatever emotion I need to, figure out what I need to do to make myself feel better and then move on. I always ask myself what I can do to make whatever it is better in the future. Sometimes it’s foreseeably nothing-if her best friends couldn’t help Polo change her behavior I highly doubt I can. Most of the time it’s just doing the best I can at my tiny piece of a very big puzzle. I’m not equipped to and nor do I want to be the class teacher for grade 6 or 7, but I can be a good English and life skills teacher. I can be a knowledgeable and supportive resource when and if the kiddos need one.

I’m learning to ride the waves. Waves which are more frequent because they are rooted in deep differences in culture and outlook on the world, in a teeny country with the second highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the entire world.

But, tomorrow is always a new day, wherever in the world we are.

Welcome lunch=lace tablecloth

Teachers! (minus grade 7 teach)

Cat brought in to kill a rat. But only slept. All week.

Look, I write letters!

Everyone!

 

White guuurrrlll

A friend of mine recently sent me a letter, which contained, among other news and queries, this question: "so, so far, thoughts on being a white girl abroad?"

Obviously, one’s experience of being a "white girl abroad" depends a whole lot on the specific country and some on the specific white girl.

So, to answer this question in a drawn out and analytical way, this white girls'

experience living in Lesotho is, in a word, complex.

Much of my experience can be summed up by this interaction:

-Me, doing anything at all outside without a hat or an umbrella to shield myself from the suns rays (many Basotho use both at once).

-Any Masotho I come across, usually a woman: "Ausi, where is your hat?! Where is your umbrella?"

-Me, smiling: "I love the sun!"

-Masotho: "Eh! Ausi! Do you want to be black like me?!

And here’s where my answer changes depending on my mood, the day and who I’m talking to:

Sometimes I’m scientific:

"I will never look like you, just like you will never look like me. It’s impossible."

Sometimes I’m cheeky:

"Hell yeah I do!"

Sometimes I’m political:

"Black is beautiful! Don’t believe the lies you’ve been told girl."

And sometimes I just smile and keep walking.

Oftentimes, it’s really nice. I often get favored for the (much roomier) front seat of taxis and the like; things that make the going just a little bit easier. Ya know, white privilege.

 Sometimes I feel like a monkey in a circus. I was doing my weekly grocery shopping in town the other day, and I passed a group of twenty something dudes. Before I even greeted them, one guy literally said, "Speak. Talk." Like I was a machine that one only has to command to make work. Bewildered but indifferent, I just greeted him in Sesotho like normal and kept walking, hearing him talking to my back in Sesotho but not giving enough of a fuck to keep talking to him.

I was buying wine the other day, and this guy comes up to the counter where I’m standing and starts talking to me, as they do, about how he wants to marry me. What I’ve found is that sometimes I just have to be really rude because your basic social cues or even a direct "I’m not interested" that usually work fine in the U.S. often do nothing to deter the bo-ntate (men) here. So he kept talking about how in love with me he was and eventually I literally said, "ugh just go away, stop talking to me." And he ambled his drunk self over to a chair to stare at me from afar instead of from 5 inches from my face, beer soaked breath getting all up in my nostrils. I do what I gotta do.

All the attention, while somewhat different in quality depending on who it’s coming from (e.g. man, woman, or child, young or old) comes from colonialism. Although Lesotho was actually never formally colonized, white missionaries were let in in exchange for protection from the British government (who later sold them out anyway) against the Dutch. And lets not forget that Lesotho is inside South Africa, where apartheid was only abolished 21 years ago. These things seep over. These stains run deep.

So, white means speaking English and money and power. If it’s a man who’s ogling me then the post-colonial internalized racism is mixed with a large dose of patriarchy. Woman means sex and marriage, so put all of those together and most people see me as a one-way ticket out of poverty to the land of the free. So, I get it. I’m under no illusions that all the attention has anything to do with me, specifically, as an individual human being. It’s exhausting, sometimes extremely so, but like so many things here (and everywhere), I find that the best way to approach it is with a sense of humor:

"You want to marry me? Are you sure about that?"

"(laughing) You’re not in love with me! You don’t even know me."

"You want to go to America? Alright, save 20,000 Maloti and check back with me in 2 years" (walks away)

And these interactions only happen outside of my village. In St. Denis, I’m definitely white but I’m no longer special. And life goes on.

Khotso