Wrapping it Up Here

Post by Lara

30 September 2014

Hello everyone! I know it's been a while. We're all wrapped up in wi-fi, college football, job interviews, and going out to dinner with everyone we didn't see for two years-- but as today is the last day of Peace Corps volunteers in Sierra Leone (at least for a while), it seems fitting to put a bit of a denouement onto our little blog.

First off, I wanted to make our last post "Our Peace Corps Service by the Numbers" in which I would list off (unemotionally) all of the things that we counted while we were in Salone, and then attach a (rather more emotional) sign-off paragraph or two, and thereby tie a nice little ribbon around the last 27 months of our lives.  BUT it never works out how we want it to, does it?  All my numbers are tucked away in a journal somewhere, and that journal was nowhere to be found today.  I'm afraid it may be a while (like a month...or several years) before I stumble across it again, probably in some place that I put it *knowing* I would remember, and at that point I may log back on here and post our real, final blog post.  In the meantime, a few words will have to do.

Now, on to the hot topic: Sierra Leone.  We left on August 1st, amid a slightly chaotic non-evacuation of all volunteers and trainees from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in the face of a seemingly sudden realization that the current Ebola outbreak wasn't going to die down as quickly as everyone estimated back in March when the first cases started showing up.  We ourselves were not pulled out of the country-- we had already packed up our house, said our goodbyes, and gotten medically cleared in anticipation of our scheduled closing date.  However, the volunteers who came to Salone a year after us, and those who had just arrived this past June, were not so lucky as to have that kind of closure before leaving. Some had no notice at all, because they were already in the US on vacation during the summer holiday.  I can't imagine how difficult and confusing it must be to serve as a volunteer for a year, knowing that I had another year to work on projects and get the teaching thing down and wrap up all my loose ends, only to find myself home indefinitely with no real plans until further notice.  And to think of packing all my things up for 2+ years, selling my car, quitting my job, and just a short 8 weeks later landing back where I started would not be easy to deal with either.  I've joked before that becoming a Peace Corps volunteer brought with it an emotional instability that I wasn't familiar with-- and these are some good examples of what I mean by that.

Of course that's the story on this side of the ocean.  On the other side, school and standardized testing have been postponed until further notice, travel is severely curtailed, and weekly markets have been banned.  Additionally, Sierra Leone has implemented nationwide shut-downs several times now, once for 3 whole days, to try and allow medical workers to catch up with the rising number of sick people who are avoiding hospitals and to slow the spread of Ebola.  News stories that we've heard are alarming, to say the least.  We haven't had a whole lot of contact with our friends and neighbors back in Salone, but we have heard that so far only one documented case of Ebola has been found in our town of Mattru Jong in the south.  Our host mother wrote us not long ago during one of the shut-downs, and told us that her kids are simply bored, because they're not allowed to leave the house.  The Ebola outbreak is touching everyone, even in places not directly experiencing the disease.

As I am neither an epidemiological expert nor a witness on the ground at this point, I don't feel comfortable describing the Ebola situation in any more detail. All I know is that the nation-wide measures being taken are making it so that even those not at the epicenter of the disease are feeling its reverberations.  Peace Corps made the decision in September to close all of its volunteers out of service on October 1st and allow them to re-apply next year for a program of their choice, including (if things are looking more stable), West Africa.  Thus, today is every volunteer's last day.  We hope that the program will continue with a new group of volunteers next year-- but it's far too soon to tell now.

Ultimately, we feel a sense of completeness about our service that I'm afraid not all the volunteers who are leaving can relate to.  We did our two years, completed our projects, locked up our house, and said goodbye to our friends.  For now, Mattru is our former home and a chapter in our lives that is at least mostly closed.  We may not have accomplished everything we planned to, but all-in-all we are happy with our time in Salone and happy as well to be home in Ohio. We are moving forward.  Kevin's looking for engineering jobs, and I will be applying to nursing school in the next year.  We're not sure where we'll end up, but we're fairly certain it will be within driving distance of our families in Ohio.

I'm not sure yet how much writing I'm going to be doing in the future, but I went ahead and created a post-Peace Corps blog, where I'll be writing from now on. You can find me (and occasionally Kevin too!) at www.ninefourten.blogspot.com.  Thanks for reading our blog, and we hope to see you in our new space!

Borrowed Kitchens: Erica's in Portland

Post by Lara

For our third installment of "Borrowed Kitchens," our hostess was Erica, in a suburb of Portland.  Erica and her roommate work early in the morning, so we had to get up early and get on the road.  We had time for a quick bite to eat first, though.

Kevin's ready to take on Portland in his bow tie! He later realized the jeans he chose for that day weren't quite skinny enough.

Eggs over medium on English muffins with local Oregon berries on the side. Pretty good for a quick fix!

Borrowed Kitchens: Alexia's Granparents' Beach House, Cambria, CA

Post by Lara

For our second "Borrowed Kitchens" post, we stopped along the California coast in beautiful Cambria, where our friend Alexia's grandparents have a beach house.  When we first heard "beach house in California," we thought of hot sun and white sand with warm waves lapping up the shore.  Well, the waves were there-- just about everything else was a bit different.  The Central California coast is not warm, and it's not terribly sandy-- but the tide pools created by the big rocks on the shoreline are very interesting-- full of hermit crabs, sea anemones, and snails.

 For our first ever dinner on the Pacific coast, we thought seafood would be fitting. We picked up some Albacore tuna steaks and cruised up to the beach house with a cooler full of vegetables from Vegas. Alexia and her sister Carina helped us prepare dinner.

Tuna steaks rubbed with salt, black pepper, and cayenne before broiling

Cauliflower and Brussels sprouts before roasting

Lemon slices for our tuna steaks

Cheddar cheese makes everything more delicious

Our dinner of tuna and roasted veggies was just perfect for our first evening on the Pacific.  The following night, we went a bit less healthy and grabbed individual slices of pie from Linn's, a famous bakery in Cambria, and ate it on the beach.  We have no regrets whatsoever.

Before leaving Cambria, we had to stop over at Hearst Castle for a quick look at what I can only describe as one of the classiest over-the-top mansions we've ever had the pleasure of being allowed into, and we were treated to an absolutely fabulous day on top of the 'Enchanted Hill'.  We also got to see a herd of zebras leftover from Hearst's menagerie-- though I wasn't quick enough to snap a photo.

 Next stop: Sacramento (after a winding climb up the coast through Big Sur).

Favorite Conveniences

Hi everyone! This is just a super quick post to update you on what's up with us at the moment. We are in Seattle after a 2000+ mile long road trip, during which we managed to meet up with 4 former volunteers from PC Sierra Leone. During our wanderings we've talked to our fellow returned volunteers about readjusting to American life after Peace Corps.

Here's a small list of the conveniences we've rediscovered and learned to appreciate in a new light:

- Even "bad" roads are nicer than what we're used to.
- Potable water is everywhere. Some of it doesn't taste good, but none of it will give us dysentery!
- We can drink all the water we want, just about whenever we want, because there are public restrooms everywhere.
- 4G. Wow.

There you go. Probably our shortest post ever.

Borrowed Kitchens, Part 1: Cheryl's in Las Vegas

Post by Lara

If you've been following our Facebook pages, you'll know Kevin and I officially closed our Peace Corps service last week and returned to the US. And unless you've been living under a rock, you will have heard that all 300+ Peace Corps volunteers and trainees have been temporarily removed from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea as a precaution related to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I may write a post on all that craziness later...but for now just know that we are safe, sad to leave Salone, and happy to be back in the USA. 

Now, on to today's topic:

As this is the first and maybe only chance we will have to take a month off and go do some interesting things while having no one to answer to, we're on a road trip! We start in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada, where Kevin's sister Cheryl just got married. We got a chance to house/dog sit for a few days, and as such we got to cook in a real, fully equipped kitchen! As we anticipate we will get to do this a few more times in the next few weeks, we decided this is a great chance to write a little series on what we like to cook when we can cook ANYTHING.We started off this meal with a trip to Walmart where we had so many choices, we nearly collapsed.  Since the only squash in Sierra Leone is pumpkin, and it's almost autumn, we decided a nice acorn squash would do great.  After that, we kind of just ran with that idea.  Here's what happened:

We chopped up some onion, celery, pepper, and carrot and tossed it with walnuts, bacon bits, raisins, olive oil, chicken stock, cumin and cinnamon.

After baking the squash by itself for 30 minutes, we added the above mixture and baked it some more! It popped and sizzled for 10 minutes or so after we removed it from the oven.

YUM

A side salad and some cheesy garlic bread rounded out our meal. Kevin washed his dinner down with Blue Moon pumpkin ale-- a bit early for fall, but we feel it's fair since we missed autumn two years in a row. 

 

There you have it! dinner came together in about an hour and 15 minutes. Not bad for a couple who used to take an hour just getting from no fire to hot charcoal!  Tomorrow we may mix up all our leftover squash and veggies into a pasta dish, or serve it in a fall-themed salad.  Stay tuned for more Borrowed Kitchen meals! 

Salone Superlatives: Best Krio Words

Post by Lara and Kevin

21 July 2014

In our two years here, we have both achieved an “advanced” mastery of Sierra Leonean Krio.  We’re a bit afraid that that level of fluency has shoved some of our English out the door…so here’s your head’s up if you’ll be seeing us upon our arrival home. Our English is Krio-ified, for sure.  As a small celebration of our impending homecoming, we want to put together some superlatives, and here, to kick it off, are some of our favorite Krio words and phrases:

Fak – A rubber band of any sort. It sounds like a very bad word, and it’s often used as a transitive verb (as in, “I’m going to fak your hair”)

 Gbing gbing [or bing bing] – A phrase used to add emphasis or to specify what you’re talking about.  We feel silly saying it, but love it at the same time.

Han Klin [as in “hand clean”] – A handkerchief, of course

Astafulay – Comes from Arabic, meaning “God forbid it”.  A great word to use when bargaining for things in the market.

Bobi Wata [literally, boob water] – Breast milk. What else would you call it?

Balans [“balance”] – To ignore.  People here do not like to be “balanced”.

Jam/Jamsi – To “jam” is to fight. A person is your “jamsi” if you had a fight and never resolved it…which means you permanently “balance” each other.

Wetin sef – Whatchamacallit (or thingamajig)

Hala hala [holler holler] – A verbal argument. Always loud. Seldom has a winner.

So so – Alternately used to mean “et cetera” or “a whole lot”. 

Teeeee [pronounced “tayyyyyyy”] – It means, “untillllll….” Usually it indicates a long time or an extensive amount (as in, “cook the sauce tayyyyyyy it has boiled for an hour”).

De de de – One of the weirdest correctly-conjugated verbs we know of, in any language.  If something “de de de,” that means it “is being there”.

Poto Poto [puddle puddle] – Mud

Roba [rubber] – A bucket. Not a condom.

We and Love and Food

Post by Lara

8 July 2014

Before Peace Corps, Kevin and I were interested in nutrition inasmuch as we liked good food and tried to incorporate as much variety into our diet as we could.  We planted herbs in our flower bed, joined a CSA, and cooked our own dinner from scratch most nights.  When we came across a fruit or vegetable we didn’t recognize, we would often buy it and figure out how to cook it.  I had a rough idea of which nutrients could be acquired from which kinds of foods, and we did what we could to get all of those, without spending too much mental energy on keeping track.  For what’s it’s worth, though, we did not follow any kind of strict diet—we had a kitchen pantry that was permanently stocked with Oreos, a fridge with a special place set aside for heavy cream, which we cooked with regularly, and we routinely ordered pizza when we didn’t want to cook—all of which I add here to reassure you that although healthy eating was high on our priority list, “junk food” was not absent from our lives, and we definitely weren’t purists of any breed.

 I don’t think that I would have told you then that nutrition was one of my main interests, in part because keeping nourished in the US is not difficult to do, and most Americans do it without making a conscious effort.  It was out on the periphery of my interests.  It wasn’t until I moved to Sierra Leone, experienced an almost total changeover from my old diet to the one I observe now, and saw how important nutrition is when you exit the first world, that I began to see this as a crucial part of my service and my post-Peace Corps life. 

For westerners living in Sierra Leone, staying nourished often means learning not to be picky—a luxury that we seem to have acquired at some point in the last few centuries.  Not liking fish, or too much oil, or onions, are totally normal things in the states, but here, you often have to set that aside and eat what’s sitting in front of you.  Many of the common dishes here are chock-full of vitamins, monounsaturated fats, lean proteins, and fiber—which are wonderful for your health.  Unfortunately, we who are not used to eating dishes swimming in oil and who have been almost conditioned to believe that carb-heavy diets are inherently unhealthy often find ourselves battling those western beliefs as we try to decide what and how much to eat here. 

Sierra Leoneans also have their ideas of what a healthy diet consists of—they know that babies should be fed exclusively breast milk until 6 months, that fish, beans, and other proteins are essential to a complete diet, and that “empty” (or plain) rice has almost no nutritional value.  There are also some interesting myths floating around here.  Almost everyone I know is afraid to eat very fibrous parts of fruits and vegetables—the little spines in pineapples, the skins of peanuts, and eggplant seeds are all taken out of foods before consumed.  This would make more sense to me if it weren’t for the fact that these same people happily gnaw the ends off their chicken bones and have no qualms whatsoever about swallowing about a million fish bones a day as they eat their rice and sauce. 

In our time here, we have attempted to make nutrition a bit easier for volunteers by editing our post’s cook book and supplying information for trainings to help those with a Western view of food to thrive in this much different environment.  We also learned how to cook local dishes in variations that are more palatable for Americans—peanut sauce without fish, potato leaf sauce with a healthy smattering of big broad beans and a handful of garlic cloves, and less oil on the whole.  Ours being an early generation post, we have a rare opportunity to help impact the way our post treats things like nutrition and staying healthy in remote locations—we have jumped at the opportunity and attempted to bring more information that is relevant to our specific country and even depicts seasonal variations in what’s available. We leave plenty of work to be done yet, but we’ve at least helped spread information that can keep Americans healthy living here in Sierra Leone.

Ultimately, no matter where you’re eating, challenges arise that can un-balance a person’s diet. In the Western world, often the main challenge is fulfilling your requirements without exceeding them—a task that daunts a larger number of people now than it ever has before.  In the developing world, eating right is mostly about getting enough of those nutrients that can be tough to come by—protein, vitamins, iron, calcium—and doing so before you fill up on carbs (in Sierra Leone, that’s usually rice).

After we complete our Peace Corps service, I’m planning to pursue a career in health care (likely nursing, though time will tell).  I know that the extreme awareness of what nutrients are in my diet, what’s missing, and how much I need to consume will fade when I’m back in an environment where I can get everything I need without trying, but I hope that the lessons learned here will stay with me, and I hope that the efforts I made here have a positive effect on the health of both volunteers and locals in Sierra Leone in the future.