Food Rules

Post by Lara

23 Feb 2014

Yesterday I went out with two volunteers, Lindsey and Brooke, to Med's Fast Food, a little eatery on a busy street in downtown Freetown. We sat upstairs in a tiny air-conditioned room and ordered egg burgers, fried chicken, a beef shawarma, and cold sodas, and we talked about food. 

For anyone who comes from somewhere other than here and enjoys food other than rice, spicy sauces, and fish, you can expect to spend a fair amount of energy thinking about what you used to eat and pining after it.  When we make it to larger cities with supermarkets and imported goods, we indulge, and we savor it. 

I told the girls that I'm mildly fascinated by the food culture among us volunteers, which is unlike anything I've experienced before.  I summarized our Salone Peace Corps food rules as follows: 1, you don't ever feel bad about eating what you're eating; 2, you get tons of good karma points for sharing what you're eating with other ex-pats; 3, if someone offers you something and you want it, you accept it immediately and without guilt; 4, you do not help yourself to anyone's food.

Lindsey, who's been in the country since June of last year, disagreed about the guilt-- she said she still feels bad about eating food and not offering it to others.  Brooke and I, who came a year earlier than Lindsey, assured her that she shouldn't feel that way.  Food is a big comfort here, and we savor every familiar taste we get.  That doesn't mean it's ok to resent a fellow volunteer for having something delicious and choosing to keep it to him or herself.  Every morsel falls in the positive column. 

Rule 4 is the one that can bring bad blood between volunteers-- we have a rather small shared space in Freetown, and the agreed-upon rule is that no matter how delicious and wonderful someone's food looks, it belongs to that volunteer unless it's offered.  When a story circulates about the volunteer who helped himself to someone's candy or  took some peanut butter from another volunteer's stash, it's met with hushed tones of, "you just don't do that."  Open food containers in public spaces are a little more ambiguous-- we tend to assume that if someone left a bag of Doritos on the verandah table, they are implying that they're willing to share. 

For Kevin and myself, sharing imported food items with other volunteers makes us feel good. As a couple, we tend to have more spending money available than those who are single, and we also have been very fortunate as far as receiving packages and visitors who help us maintain what I consider to be a healthy level of processed sugar and salty goodness.  Passing a bit of prepackaged love around is a nice way to bond with our fellow volunteers, and this is one of the few times in our lives that we don't worry even a little bit about the empty calories and unhealthy ingredients in our processed foods of choice.  For this brief period, we can gain a moment of pure, unadulterated gladness from a bite of beef jerky or a single Oreo.  That's worth taking advantage of.

On Chickens and Mandalas

Post by Lara

18 February 2014

Today as I came home from school I was greeted by Dot, our first and favorite hen.  Dot’s been sitting on eggs lately—she laid 7 and now she’s brooding.  That means we only see her once or twice a day when she gets up to stretch her legs, grab a drink, relieve herself, and peck at a bit of dry rice we throw her.  Dot and I have a special relationship—she comes right up to me in the afternoons and waits patiently for half a cup of rice to hit the yard. If I dally, she might peck my leg gently.  If too many chickens come running when I throw the rice, she leaves the group and waits off to the side for me to throw a special handful to her.  I oblige, because she’s just too loyal to let down.  As I watched Dot eat today, I thought about what’s going to become of her and her 4 sister hens when we leave in half a year.  She won’t lay eggs forever—when she’s stopped, someone will decide it’s harvest time and have a chicken dinner. We tend not to kill and eat the chickens we raise (perhaps more on that in a later post), though we definitely understand the dynamic—chickens are livestock, and when Dot ceases to be the first and favorite hen at our house, she’ll be up on the menu.  I could worry about that, or try to prevent it, but soon enough I’ll be halfway around the world with a host of different problems in my mind, and the fate of Dot the Hen will be far out of my hands. 

In my world religions class in high school, I learned about the Buddhist and Hindu tradition of making mandalas—elaborate pieces of artwork made with colored sand on a flat surface.  Buddhist monks work carefully to design and complete mandalas, sometimes placing single grains of sand at a time, and then when the work is complete, they take a broom and sweep it all away, in an effort to remain cognizant of the fact that everything in this world is temporary and we can’t allow ourselves to be attached to physical things that will one day break or die or fly away.  The point of a mandala is the making of it—the effort expended to make something beautiful, geometric, complex.  That it won’t be there a few seconds after you’ve finished it doesn’t negate the work you did—whether it lasted a few moments or several millennia, it was never meant to exist forever. 

In that class in high school, we did our own mandalas with crayons on paper. I did my best to make a beautiful design, filling in all the colors I could and concentrating on getting everything right. At the end of the class period, our teacher made us rip the mandalas up and throw them away. I wasn’t finished coloring mine and it caused me almost physical pain to destroy my little piece of art, especially when I hadn’t even gotten to complete it.  I knew that was the point, but it didn’t make it any easier. 

The lesson of making a mandala was one of my most memorable in high school—you work hard, do something as well as you can, delve into the details, and then before you’re ready, push it aside and let the world reduce it back to chaos and spontaneity.  The fact that it didn’t end up in a frame or in a museum doesn’t take away from the beauty and completeness of the mandala—it only serves to illustrate the things we can and can’t control in this world. I can control my effort, my drive, my creativity—I can’t control what others will do with my work, how quickly it fades from memory, how it will be interpreted after I’m no longer around to give my own explanations.  I’ve learned from mandala-making that I shouldn’t rely on external parameters to measure my life’s work—that sometimes the act of doing, making, creating, building something is more important than the object built.

Peace Corps service strikes me as a cogent parallel to mandala-making.  Those who volunteer surely came into service with an end in mind—whether it was teaching kids to read or reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS or learning how to surf or getting seasoned at raising chickens (hey—not everyone joined Peace Corps to save the world). Still, what makes the most impact is the time spent building a life here.  The work itself—the daily activities and interactions we have with the people we’re serving, that’s the point of being here.  Time is short.  I have two years to learn how to be a Sierra Leonean woman—cooking rice, hand-washing clothes, walking over a mile to buy a cup of beans, getting my hair braided for holidays, learning the language, watching my pineapples grow, and caring for my chickens.  At the end of two years, everything about my life here ceases to be mine—I’ll go back to the states and leave all the untied ends of Peace Corps life to unravel in my absence.  The mural I painted will crack and fade and eventually be painted over.  The programs I started may continue or they may not—it won’t be up to me anymore.  And the key to going home satisfied is to carry the lesson of the mandala with me—each perfect little piece of sand you placed had its moment—and now the moment’s up.  Let the world do with it what it will. Be glad for the effort.

Yu Get Faya?

10^th February, 2014

Post by Lara

Cooking takes up a large part of the day here in Sierra Leone.  The majority of us who cook over wood or charcoal fires have to start the fire, boil water to keep in a thermos for hot drinks, pick the rocks and seeds out of the rice before washing it, watch the rice carefully and adjust the flame to keep it from burning, and make sauce from scratch. To go from no fire to dinner on the table takes a minimum of 2 hours, and sometimes a lot longer.  When the wood is wet or for whatever reason doesn’t want to catch, the task of making dinner becomes daunting.  For this reason, you tend to thank your lucky stars if any of your neighbors did their cooking before you, because then you can walk over with a metal pan and ask, “Yu get faya?” [Do you have fire?].  If some embers remain, the neighbors will gladly let you scoop them out and carry them home to start your own fire by just adding some kindling and fanning the flames back up.  It’s a nice break from the task of gathering little bits of fuel (or in our case throwing a splash of kerosene on the coals) and a box of matches and gently coaxing a fire to life over the course of half an hour. Those with the embers don’t tend to be bitter about the fact that they slaved away to get their cook fire going and you got to reap the benefits—perhaps because they know that they’ll be on the receiving end one day.  Perhaps this custom of mooching off of neighbors can give us insight into some of the frustrations we face as teachers in Sierra Leone.

 Just last week I graded a math assignment where the answer to one question was 8⁵ = 32768. Of the 50 or so students who did the assignment, I’d say about half got the right answer, a quarter had something completely different, and the remaining quarter wrote 32728 or 32708.  It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that this last group of students copied the answers from someone, and did so poorly.  When I mentioned to my students that a lot of them “spied” the answers from others, several students adamantly insisted that they didn’t cheat.  I pointed out that it’s more likely that they copied incorrectly than that their calculator decided to feed them the wrong answer, and still a few claimed innocence.  For me, this kind of bold-faced denial is a sign that my students don’t rightly understand the point of homework and assignments, which is to figure out how to get the right answer before you’re forced to do it by yourself on a test.  I have no issue with my students helping each other, but it concerns me when they fail to see the difference between one five-digit number and another, and also fail to see the difference between entering 8⁵ in their calculators and just attempting to copy the answer from the nearest kid, whose handwriting is less than readable. 

Giving tests, we learn that the problem of “spying” is almost ubiquitous—especially if the teacher in charge is obviously not paying attention to the students.  Kevin likes to bring a book with him on test days and sit in front of the students reading—as his eyes go down to the book, he sees students leaning over to other desks, passing papers, and otherwise doing whatever they can to share their answers.  His zero-tolerance policy means that when he does catch a student cheating, he takes the test immediately and sends the student out—that tends to whip the others into shape a lot faster than verbal warnings.  For myself, I happened to walk into one of my exams that was being proctored by two other teachers last December, and I saw students fully out of their seats looking at the same paper or consulting on answers.  Needless to say, I was appalled. The prevalence of relying on other students for answers is such that I honestly have trouble deciding who it is in my classes that understands the material and who is just fairly good at copying from someone who gets it.  What’s even more surprising is that my students and even some teachers we know tend to be confused that we Americans make such a big deal out of cheating.  I’m beginning to think that my students and fellow teachers view education in much the same way as they view making a fire.

I have to remember that as human beings we are pack animals who have learned how to rely on each other when we can’t fend for ourselves.  In the realm of collectivistic behavior, Sierra Leonean society is certainly more extreme than that of the US.  Good manners here dictate that when you’re eating, you should always offer some food to anyone you know who happens by, no matter how small your own portion is.  Children are frequently raised by family friends or even acquaintances who live near a school that the child can attend.  I’ve seen 6 kids share one lollipop.  Adults eat off the same plate together.  And students share answers.  Perhaps this phenomenon shouldn’t come as a surprise—just as it’s perfectly acceptable to let your neighbor labor over lighting a fire and then scoop out the remnants to start your own, our students don’t seem to see any harm in one or two of them slaving away to wrap their minds around a new topic and then passing the results—the answers, not the methodology—along to those who don’t get it.

Photo Post! A Slightly Random Selection

 No wordy post today-- just some pictures that have been hanging out in our archives for a while waiting to be published. Enjoy!

This is the view from the back seat of a poda-poda, a stripped-down vehicle (nearly always 2WD) that shuttles 20-30 people and several thousand pounds of goods around the country on roads that most Americans wouldn't consider to be roads at all.  Random fact: we get less car-sick in podas than we do in 4WD vehicles. These guys have to move so slowly it's tough to get nauseous. If you're in a Jeep, however, you do a whole lot of bouncing around.

 

A sunset captured at our house. When the seasons are changing (rainy to dry in October/November and dry to rainy in May/June), we get some lovely colors.

Our neighbor, Momito, popo-ing Shrek.  This is how women tie their babies to be carried on their backs. Kids practice with dolls, stuffed animals, statues...basically anything somewhat baby-shaped. Our favorite was a statue of Mary that a 3-year-old neighbor popo-ed for several days.

No dump truck? No problem! Just grab some buckets or rice bags and about 200 extra hands and you can move a pile of sand in no time flat.

This is what happens when you walk around our town with a camera out. These kids were just standing by their respective houses waving at us until they saw we were taking pictures.

Same kids, this time giving us a bad-ass pose

December through February, mornings can get "cold" (think 73-78 degrees F) We bought the girls next door some winter hats so they could get through their morning chores without their ears freezing off!

Who Should Be a PCV?

Post by Lara

23 January 2014

When we were home over the holidays, we had a lot of conversations about our experience thus far in Sierra Leone. Tarantulas were high on the list of topics that came up, as was the heat, and the fact that we eat rice for almost every meal.  We were asked what the best thing is, what the worst thing is, how many students we teach, how many chickens we’ve killed, and what the religious makeup of the country is. We enjoyed fielding all these questions and giving our friends and family some idea of what life is like for us here.  At one point my dad half-jokingly asked me, “So, are you going to tell your little sister she should become a Peace Corps volunteer?” My response may have come across as rather harsh: “I don’t think that I would tell anyone they should join the Peace Corps.”

OK hold up—before you go thinking that this experience has turned me against the government agency that’s had my life in its hands for almost 2 years, let me explain.  For Kevin and me, joining the Peace Corps was an incredibly big choice.  If you know us personally, you know that choice came at quite a cost. We both had steady, salaried jobs that we gave up (as in, not going to get them back) to come here. Kevin sacrificed two years of professional experience in engineering to join, hoping that two years of foreign aid work in a country that could most definitely use more mechanical engineers would be enough to convince future employers of his potential.  We put off starting a family for the time we volunteered (malaria prophylaxes and pregnancy apparently don’t mix). We had to be willing to learn a new language (or two!), to eat whatever was laid before us, at least as long as it took to be able to cook our own food, and to go to work in parts of Sierra Leone that even some Sierra Leoneans refuse to live in.  We knew when we joined that we were in for the ride of our lives, and we were willing to sit back and see what these two plus years would bring.

Another favorite question from our family and friends was, “Would you do it all again?” Every time, I felt the need to give a rather complicated answer: “If you’re asking whether I would make the same decision again a year and a half ago, yes. If you’re asking if I plan to volunteer again for another 2 years, no.”  Two years is a long time to be away from everything and everyone you’ve ever known.  The Atlantic Ocean is a long distance across, and though we have been incredibly, crazy-fortunate to have been able to make not one but two trips back across the pond during our service, we still feel the distance.  In the time that’s passed since we left Ohio in 2012, we’ve had one nephew born, 5 first cousins announce they’re expecting (3 of those babies born so far), two siblings get engaged and one of those married, and two siblings move across the country.  We’ve missed weddings, births, funerals, and family gatherings.  And though it’s tough, I do think the experience we’ve had here—the relationships formed and the life lessons learned have been worth it. That being said, I’m not signing up to extend the time I’m away. 

It seems to me that if you’re the kind of person who can enjoy two years living in a foreign country, eating new foods, learning new languages, managing with limited communication and electricity, adjusting your cultural lens and re-evaluating your personal ethics as need be, then you don’t need someone to tell you that Peace Corps is a good option.  And if you’re not that kind of person, getting on a plane to a developing country is likely not going to change your perspective.  People who learn about what being a volunteer is like and think, yeah, I could get behind that—those are the people who will be willing to take the initiative, fill out the application, go to the interview, and wait (it was 11 months for us!) to hear back. And those are probably the people who will make good volunteers—as opposed to someone who was told by their advisor or their friend or their big sister that they ought to do it.

Obviously we’re all cut from different cloth.  I don’t want to suggest that anyone who looks into volunteering for a reason other than the one I had is wrong—but I also think it’s important that anyone who decides to spend two years working for a cause, any cause, comes to that decision on his or her own terms.  Kevin and I are happy with the choices we’ve made, in part because they were our choices.  I can only hope the same for my little sister, no matter where life takes her.