African film vs. American film

20 July 2012

Post by Lara (diagram by Kevin)

One of our host family’s favorite pastimes is to gather around the 10-inch screen of their electronic DVD player (with anywhere from 6-10 people occupying the small living room) and settle in with an African film or two before going to bed.  The films we watch tend to be Sierra Leonean, Nigerian, and Ghanaian.  On the surface, they aren’t unlike American films—they have romance, love triangles (and octagons, sometimes), revenge, family feuds, friendships, births, deaths, etc.  I certainly cannot say I’ve done a detailed enough study of these films to give any sweeping descriptions of the overarching themes and elements of each genre, but there are some things we’ve noticed about the African films we’ve seen that stand out.

As opposed to the neatly packaged “crisis-climax-dénouement” model that we were taught in our American high school English classes and that nearly every mainstream film that we’ve seen tends to follow, the African films we’ve watched tend to cycle through crises and climaxes every 5-10 minutes, and even introduce new characters with their own plotlines well past the halfway point of the film.  As a matter of fact, the physical timeline of these films seems widely arbitrary.  Most of them are split into 2 parts, and the films tend to end somewhere between 1 and 2 hours in, whether the conflict is resolved or not.  Kevin used his mad skills to draw up a general plot diagram of American vs. African films here:

Another interesting feature in many of these films is the soundtrack.  We’ve noticed a certain minor chord played on the synthesizer that we’ve heard in every single film so far, to denote suspense and/or surprise. For most other parts of a film, an upbeat sounding tune is played in the background, even when two characters are fighting (we’ve been told that music is omnipresent in Africa, and our experience so far certainly supports that observation).  One film we watched was a musical and made extensive use of Kanye West-style auto-tuning while the characters sang about their hardships.  We’ve also heard Phil Collins and Boyz II Men (“They read you Cinderella, You hoped it would come true, and one day your Prince Charming would come rescue you…” you can bet I was singing along to that one with our 16 year old host brother!) 

Kevin pointed out as we were talking through the differences in the films we grew up with and the African films we’ve watched since we arrived here is that they much more closely resemble soap operas, and I think that is a solid point. A lot of these films tend to end abruptly without tying up all of the loose ends, which one can certainly argue is more reflective of real life than those that wrap up neatly inside a 90-minute plotline. The films can be very interesting to say the least, and I’m sure they offer plenty of insight into some of the cultural differences we are coming face-to-face with during our time in Salone.  We may update this post in the future, but for now it sums up our thoughts pretty well.

First Pancakes

Post by Lara

20  July 2012

Last week, our host mother procured some flour, eggs, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda and allowed us to make our own breakfast-for-dinner (i.e. brinner) one evening. We decided to add some bananas and groundnuts (peanuts) to make them a bit more interesting, and set to work frying American pancakes in a wok over a coal fire, with a big metal spoon to flip them.  While we fried our pancakes, our 5 youngest host siblings sat around us helping out as much as possible, while we did our best to appreciate their zeal and ignore our American yearning for wider personal bubbles and independence. 

As I poured the very first pancake, I explained to my host siblings that we have an American proverb that “You always mess up the first pancake,” referring to parents tending to make all their rookie mistakes with child number one and then finding a better rhythm with subsequent children.  [Yes, Eric and Keith: we mean you.] We burnt the first one a bit, which my sister Mami K pointed to saying, “this is a bad child.” We had a good laugh while the rest of the pancakes cooked, and they always pointed out whether the “kids” were good or bad.  When they were all done, we let each of our family members have one pancake with some Ohio maple syrup on top. Our first effort at cooking American food in Salone was a success.

Today was Mami K’s birthday, so we went out on a special run to the supermarket and bought what we needed to make chocolate chip cookies.  With the 5 youngest siblings in tow again, we headed over to our training site which has a coal-heated oven and made our cookie dough.  Since we used vegetable oil rather than butter, I was afraid the cookies might spread wide in the oven, so for my first tray I set out just four little dough balls with at least 6 inches between them. Effe, the eldest sister, asked me why I was only putting four in. I explained my logic, and 16-year-old Abdulai chimed in, “Dis na di fos pikin dem” (“These are the first children”).  This is pretty stellar example of accomplishing Peace Corps Goal 2: working toward a greater understanding of America and Americans on behalf of the people of our host country.  Mark one point in the “Win” column!

*Note* In the nearly 2 months we’ve been in-country, we have now made pancakes, chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting, chocolate chip cookies, bread pudding, and a pineapple upside-down cake. We have used charcoal to make each of these- either in a metal oven that is heated with charcoal or over a small coal pot. We’ve used a Dutch oven and a double boiler. So far everything we’ve turned out has been delicious; though it’s not always pretty enough to feature in Better Homes and Gardens. Soon we’ll be branching on to entrees: Teriyaki chicken with pineapple and rice is number one on the list. Being relatively obsessed with food, you can bet we will be posting updates on our various culinary adventures.

Site Visit

Post by Lara

16 July 2012

We are on a visit to our site for 4 days to meet the PCV we are replacing as well as some community members, and gain a little footing in our community before we move here to stay in August.  We had guessed that we would be in a bigger village/town since there are two of us, and we were right. I don’t know the actual population size of the town, but it is the acting district capital and has 4 secondary schools and 6 primary schools, which means it is one of the larger communities in Salone that gets Peace Corps Volunteers.  One of our tasks on this visit is to view both of the houses prepared for us by our respective schools and choose which one we will live in (since they didn’t know they were getting a married couple until recently, the town prepared two separate residences to house their PCVs).  We are staying at the first house during our visit, and it is where the current volunteer lives. It is on the school grounds of my school, surrounded by 50-year-old mango, avocado, and plum trees which offer some much-appreciated shade.  It actually gets chilly here some nights, which is a welcome feeling for me.  

The house is also close to not one but two water pumps, and being on the school grounds it is removed from the regular hustle and bustle of the town.  The other house that was prepared is in town, in a much busier area. The one thing that it has over the first house is that it has an indoor bathroom (the first house has an indoor toilet but you have to walk outside to get to it). Still, we have basically fallen in love with the house on my school’s compound, so we’ve decided this is where we’ll be staying. 

While on our visit, the volunteer we are replacing made several yummy foods with us, including spaghetti and Alfredo sauce (made with Laughing Cow cheese!) with garlic toast, boiled sweet corn with margarine and salt, and a devil’s food cake with peanut butter frosting.  The cake was a veritable dream-come-true, and we basically lucked out trying to bake it over a coal pot. For whatever reason, it didn’t rise all that far (it was a 2-year-old cake mix—long story), so it was fudgy and dense, and the peanut butter frosting stayed warm and goopy, poured over top.  We have been planning to build an oven once we get to site, and this experience got us all that much more pumped to get our oven built once we move to site in August.

Another thing we noticed on our trip to site was that we really need to learn Mende.  In the market especially, Krio might be used to bargain prices, but beyond that everyone greets and chats and wants to know your life story in Mende, and all we know how to say right now is “hello,” “how are you?”, and “I thank God,” which functions as “fine” in Mende.  Kevin had a fun moment one day in town when we walked through with our principals and an elderly lady started talking to him in Mende. He ventured a guess at what she was saying and responded “I thank God,” at which point my principal started laughing and explained to Kevin that she had just said she is going to steal this man from his wife, and he had responded that he praises God.  Oh well- we’ve only had one week of class so far. We have a new motivation for taking our classes seriously now, namely that we don’t want to accidentally get a divorce or run into some other hitch just because we didn’t know what we were agreeing to! 

Overall, we loved our site visit and are now very excited to finish training and move to site in August. Kevin will be teaching math and physics at a technical and vocational secondary school, and I will be teaching math and chemistry at my secondary school.  I am a little worried about teaching chemistry, but I found out that there isn’t another chemistry teacher other than the current volunteer, and before he showed up there was no one even attempting to teach chemistry. I don’t necessarily feel that I’m qualified to teach chemistry, except that I am probably more qualified than no teacher at all.  It will certainly be a challenge, and if you know one thing about me it’s that I love a challenge.