Gbessay Sabi Kuk! #1: Yebe

Post by Lara

2 October 2012

Krio has its roots mainly in English and local African languages, but a bit of Portuguese weaseled its way in as well. One of the words that comes from Portuguese is sabi, which means “know”.  Any of you who have studied a romance language probably know a similar word, such as “saber” in Spanish.  In Salone, to sabi is a very respectable thing. Gbessay Sabi Kuk! [Gbessay knows how to cook!] is actually the name of the folder on our computer where Kevin stores all of our lovely cooking photos, so I decided to steal the title for our series on Salone recipes.

Since it’s October and presumably chilly weather is working its way into the year back in the states, I want to start the series by giving you a nice stick-to-your-ribs recipe: Yebe [“yay-bay”] in Krio, or Patii [“pah-tee”] in Mende.   It’s also called porridge.  Don’t be fooled by the word porridge, though—this is not hot cereal. It’s a stew made with root vegetables, fruit, and usually at least one kind of meat or fish.  The traditional Salone version also comes with a generous helping of hot pepper, which I will include here as optional, since I know many of you aren’t big fans of spice.  I think that if you omit the hot pepper though, you should try to add some lemon juice or salt to balance out the sweetness of the fruit and sweet potatoes. 

We lived in Salone for almost 3 months before I tasted Yebe, and I was blown away- it’s basically a hearty tropical fruit stew, which may not sound good, but in my opinion is quite delicious.  If you like sweet and savory foods together (like Hawaiian pizza, honey-roasted peanuts, or McDonald’s McGriddles), I think you should give this recipe a try. If you’re worried about the meat and fish, leave it out. It’s not 100% necessary.  Below is a picture of the ingredients we used last time we made Yebe, then the recipe.  This recipe serves about 4 people.  Please let us know if you try it and what you think! 

Ingredients:

2 pounds tubers [sweet potatoes, potatoes, cassava root, yams, etc], peeled and cubed

Enough water or coconut milk to just cover tubers

1 chicken breast, cooked and cut up, or 1 can tuna or chicken [we use chicken or fresh or dried fish; it’s popular here to put both in at the same time, which Kevin is really not a fan of]

2 medium onions, chopped finely

2 medium bananas broken into chunks

1 boullion cube (it helps to dissolve it in a small amount of hot water before adding)

Salt and pepper to taste

Optional Ingredients:

Other root vegetables: Try carrots, parsnip, rutabaga, or beets, peeled and chopped

Fruit of your choice: Try mangoes, pineapple, apples, peaches, or strawberries, peeled and cut up

Hot pepper to taste [Sierra Leoneans use a generous handful of small chile peppers]

1/8 cup vegetable oil, or better yet, coconut oil

1 lb ripe plantain bananas, cut into chunks

2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

Cinnamon, ginger, or other aromatic spices to taste

Start by cutting the root vegetables into chunks. You can honestly use almost any root vegetable, but sweet potatoes are especially nice, and I like to add a more bland option as well, like regular potatoes, to balance the flavor.  Put the cut root veggies in a big pot and add just enough water or coconut milk to cover them. You could also use some fruit juice, though we haven’t tried that yet.  Put the pot on to boil and while it’s heating, cut up the onions, pepper, and any other ingredients you plan to add.  As the root veggies cook, add one boullion cube (we usually use chicken but you can choose whatever you want), and a healthy pinch of both salt and pepper. When the root vegetables soften enough to pierce them with a fork, add the onions, pepper, garlic, chicken or fish, and any other fruit except plantains and bananas.  Cook for 20 minutes or so, adding water if the mixture is too thick (you want it to be a bit thicker than a vegetable-beef stew).  When all of the ingredients are cooked and soft, add the bananas and oil. Cover and let cook about 5 minutes, then take the lid off and mash the bananas and some of the potatoes. Taste the Yebe and add salt or pepper if necessary here. You also may want to squeeze a little lemon juice in.  When the bananas are well mashed, you’re finished.  Serve with garlic bread or any hearty bread that you can dip into the Yebe.

Not a Real Blog Post, part 3

Post by Lara

11 September- 10  October 2012

•  Our group voted on “Superlatives” for the end of training and we managed to make off with 3 superlatives between the two of us! Kevin received the “Eagle Scout Award” [especially funny since he was never a scout]; Lara received “Most Likely to Wear the Pants in Any Situation” [dear friends from home—here’s the best assurance I can give you that I haven’t changed too much here in Africa]; and finally, as a couple we were awarded “Iron Chef: Salone”.  We plan to continue to live up to our titles.
•   I have to walk 50 feet from my back door to go to the toilet. The weirdest thing about this is that it’s not that weird anymore.
•  It’s a really odd feeling knowing that the weather’s getting cooler back home, the leaves should be changing color and falling soon, and things like hayrides and football games are going on.  It’s about to enter the dry season here, which means even hotter weather.  We’re kind of sad that we’re missing Ohio autumn.
•  We still haven’t gotten used to being identified by our skin color everywhere we go. We’ve expanded our repertoire of retorts and tend to choose among them based on what kind of mood we’re in and/or how old the person is who is calling us “Pumoi” or “Oporto”.  Sometimes we respond “Mende moi/Mende man” or “ndupoilele/black child”; other times we tell them they should ask us our name. Sometimes we just ignore it, which never ever makes it stop. The only thing that helps is to remind ourselves that race relations are not even remotely the same here as they are in the states, and people who call us “white guy” &etc. have no idea that they’re going against an American cultural norm. 
• One big benefit to living in a tropical climate? Bread dough rises SO WELL! We’ve made monkey bread, dinner rolls, breadsticks, and pizza, and they all rose so nicely I told Kevin we may have to consider moving to Florida when we get back to the states. Back in Ohio, we had to carefully position our dough near a register or in a sunny window to get it to rise this nicely.
• We each have at least 3 names at the moment- this is incredibly hard to keep track of when we’re being asked our names everywhere we go. At school, we are Mr. and Mrs. Flaute. At home, we are Auntie Lara and Uncle Kevin. In the market, we are either Mr. and Mrs., or Gbessay and Abubakar. We are also frequently called other Americans’ names, such as “Dennis” (a friend here who works at a local NGO), or “Hindolo/Christo” (the previous Peace Corps volunteer’s name), or “Yema” (another previous Peace Corps volunteer from nearby), or “Nyanda” (Christo’s girlfriend’s Mende name).  We also are frequently called “Nyande,” which is a Mende word similar to “buddy” or “friend”.  We basically answer to just about everything.
• On the topic of things happening in 3’s, we also speak 3 languages on a daily basis here: English, Krio, and Mende.  On top of that, our American English is not understood here, so we’ve learned to slow down and enunciate all of our T’s and select our vocabulary carefully to be sure that we’re getting our message across. You could probably stretch it to 4 languages if you consider the English we speak at home and with our American friends to be different from the English we speak with Sierra Leoneans.
• We have taken it upon ourselves to name several of our neighbors’ chickens.  The two mother hens that are leading chicks around are Big Mama and Lady, and the squat little hen with tiny stubby legs that make her waddle everywhere she goes is Pesto, named for the fat pigeon from The Animaniacs “The Goodfeathers”.  There are probably 15 chickens, and so far we’ve only named 3, but we’ve got two years to name the rest of them.
• It’s been over a month at site and we are finally able to boast that we can start our coal fire on the first try! This is a big step. Our method involves a small pile of very strategically placed coal, one capful of kerosene, a match, and a fan. This is also the reason that our arm muscles are practically bulging now- fanning coals into a fire is hard work!
• To our friends Angie, Eric, Steve, and Alyssa as well as our families: thank you, thank you, thank you for the care packages you’ve sent us since we arrived here! The goodies from home as well as the school supplies and teaching materials are all highly appreciated and we are thrilled to have such wonderful friends to send us love all the way across the ocean (and/or the Bering Sea).

A friend of our friend, Dennis, came by with breadfruit, plums, and coconuts from his village

A Day in the Life

 

Post by Lara

2 October 2012

Now that school has started, we are happy to have settled into a daily routine that isn’t as taxing as our 8am-5pm schedule during training, though it starts just as early.  Here’s a typical Salone Squared weekday:

2:00am: Wake up to the neighbors’ dogs and every other dog within hearing distance howling together. We don’t know why they do it, but it’s almost a nightly occurrence.  The howling usually lasts about 5-10 minutes, but occasionally it goes on much longer. On more than one occasion we’ve had to resort to our earplugs.  This never fails to remind me of the “twilight bark” scene of 101 Dalmatians.

6am: Alarm goes off. About 50% of the time I snooze it, which gives me ten more minutes to sleep before we need to get up and make breakfast.  If the temperature is below 75 degrees, we put on long sleeved shirts as soon as we get out of bed. It’s kind of sad, but we’ve definitely started adjusting to living in the tropics.

6:15am: Start up the kerosene stove to either make hot cereal or reheat last night’s dinner. Cereal options are oatmeal, bulgur wheat, and blended, a porridge made with corn flour.  PS- our food keeps just fine overnight unrefrigerated, but we have to be sure to heat it to steaming before eating it. We usually add a splash of water to keep it from burning to the bottom of the pan. We also make hot drinks from our 2.5 litre thermos [in Krio: flaks or “flask”] and greet all of our neighbors as they emerge one at a time from the other side of the duplex.

7:15am: Kevin leaves for school if he’s walking. If he’s taking his bicycle he leaves a bit later. It’s almost a mile to his school, and he is expected to greet just about everyone he passes along the way.

If it's raining, Kevin brings his work clothes in a waterproof bag and gets soaked on the way

7:40am: Lara leaves for school.  Since we live on Lara’s school grounds, this is a very quick walk downhill to the staff room to sign in.

Morning Assembly at CSS

7:45am: Morning assembly at both schools. Both are Christian schools, so assembly includes Christian songs and prayers. This is also the time when teachers or the principals give announcements. Assembly frequently runs over into 1^st period, which is a bit of a frustration.

8:00am: Classes begin. This term, we are teaching a combination of high school math, advanced high school math, and physics.  Our students are pretty typical high school students: larger classes are rowdier, the “science” students tend to be more serious about their studies, and classroom management requires a fair bit of creativity on our part. Unfortunately, our students are nearly all behind where they should be. It’s our goal to help those who are serious about their studies to catch up to where they should be by the time we leave.

Kevin teaching long multiplication

10:30am: Eat a sandwich that we made this morning. Options are usually homemade peanut butter and jam, nutella, or cinnamon sugar. Sometimes we have a hard-boiled egg, sardines, or homemade pickles.  When we’re not in class we are in the staff rooms of our respective schools, which are a bit different from typical American teachers’ lounges in that they tend to have students coming in and out throughout the day and sometimes teachers even choose to discipline their students in the staff room.  I’m interested to talk to the teachers and see how many of them would like the idea of a student-free staff room, which is generally taken for granted in American schools.

12:00pm: If it’s Thursday, Lara is done with class and goes to the market. Thursday is market day, so vendors come from all of the neighboring villages and even up the river from the large island 50 miles south of us. We’ll write a post about market day sometime soon- it’s quite the experience.

The store operated by Hawa, one of Lara's favorite vendors.  She is embarrassed to be photographed so she's hiding in the back.

2:00pm: School lets out. Lara walks a few hundred feet home and puts out our solar chargers, any laundry that didn’t dry the day before, and at least once a week our bedding- to let the sun keep any mold in check (one of the fine by-products of rainy season). Kevin often swings into town on his way home and picks up bread for the next day or any food items we need.  If it hasn’t rained in a day or two, we pump a few buckets full of water at the pump next to our house.

Everything gets line-dried here-- even Tiggers

3:00-6:00pm: At some point we start the coal pot for dinner. It takes about 2 hours to go from no fire to dinner on the table, depending on how fancy we feel like being [fried taquitos take longer, soup takes a lot less time].  We also put a pot of water on to boil and store that in our flaks so we can make coffee or tea, and also to heat our bath water later.  In this time we plan lessons and work on home-improvement projects such as painting our wash room or cleaning out one of our spare rooms to keep our new hen in at night.

Our coal pot with a pot of water on top

Saving leftovers in a thermos for the next day

5:00-7:30pm: Eat dinner. If it’s dark already, we eat by candlelight or by our radio’s LED reading light. Around this time our neighbors send over food to eat as well. It’s usually about a serving of rice and sauce. When we’re finished eating, we save 2 servings in a Tupperware container for morning, and feed all of our leftovers [plus things we don’t want such as fish heads and chicken bones] to the neighbors’ 3 dogs: Champion, Lucky, and Anobino [that last one is Krio for “I didn’t know”]. 

8:00pm: Mix up bath water and wash—sometimes with a bucket and a cup, other times with our camp shower, which is one of our favorite possessions, by the way.  The newly-painted washroom is lovely, and we’re just putting in some finishing touches before we move on to our next house project, painting our parlour (read: living room) floor.

The wash room

9:30pm: Brush teeth and go to bed. Sometimes watch a TV episode on our computer, or plan lessons, or read, or write in a journal before going to bed.

Salone Skul Dem [Salone Schools] – Part 1

Post by Lara

9/25/12

By request, I’m starting a new series on schools in Salone- similarities and differences to US schools, and hopefully I’ll be able to give you a good idea of how I spend most of my days now that the school year has begun.  Today I’ll describe the physical layout of the school property as well as the buildings and classrooms.

The view of Kevin's school (St. Joseph TVSS) from the top of the water tower

One of our fellow volunteers told me early on that schools here remind her of the schools in her hometown in California.  That being said, they look almost nothing like the schools that I attended in Ohio growing up. Something about below zero weather during part of the year seems to result in Ohio schools being built enclosed with strong roofs and heaters and well-sealable windows.  Schools here are often open campuses with classroom buildings separated by green space or gravel rather than enclosed buildings.  The buildings are built from concrete or blocks, and usually are painted (my school is not- it’s built of textured stone blocks instead).  Students meet in the middle of the school grounds for morning assembly before going to class, so the meeting space is usually big enough for a few hundred students.  In my own school which was built by Christian missionaries, the assembly takes place in the chapel.

The Chapel at Centennial Secondary School (Lara's school)

Inside the classroom, the windows seldom have glass (it’s too hot here to warrant closing the windows anyway), and the room is generally big enough to pack 50-100 students in, 3 to a bench-seat.  The chalkboard may or may not be a board—sometimes it’s just a rectangle of black paint on the wall, other times it’s a painted board nailed to the wall.  Between the not-so-freshly-painted chalkboards and the open windows, glare can be a serious issue at times. Some teachers I know bring cloth to hang over the windows when the sun is coming in directly to cut down on blackboard glare; others only use the part of the board that is readable.  This is a difficult constraint to deal with because students here seldom have textbooks, so whatever the teacher gives as notes serves as the textbook for the class. 

A senior secondary classroom at CSS

Just like in the states, schools here have a crest, school colors, a song, a motto, a uniform, and other defining characteristics. At my secondary school, Junior Secondary [junior high] girls wear a blue dress trimmed with white and boys wear a white button-down shirt and khaki shorts.  Senior Secondary [high school] girls wear a white button-down shirt and a blue skirt, and boys wear white button-down shirts and khaki shorts or pants.  The white button-down shirts are stamped with the school crest.  All students wear white socks and black shoes.  At Kevin’s school, the uniform is similar but boys wear blue shorts or pants.  The uniforms are made by local tailors (almost always men) who work on foot-pedal sewing machines.  Students must come to school in proper uniforms or they risk being punished or sent home—pretty similar to my Catholic high school.  Kevin’s school has gone a step past uniforms and requires that girls not have more than 10 braids in their hair at school.

Construction of a new building at TVSS

The schools that we have seen in Sierra Leone tend to be well-cared for, though the condition of the paint and facilities varies greatly.  Some schools were clearly painted within the last year, whereas others have taken a beating from at least one rainy season, which is enough to leave buildings looking much more worn than a year of Ohio weather does.  Rainy season also causes the “bush” to grow up on the school grounds in a crazy way.  A few weeks in Salone rainy season will cause un-cut brush to grow up like a whole summer without mowing in Ohio.  Also, when they decide to clear the brush, they do so by hand with a cutlass. It’s slow-going, to say the least, but I’ve been amazed at the industrious way that Sierra Leoneans attack brush here—they are aware that tall grass provides a breeding ground for mosquitoes, so they try to stay on top of things.

A lot of schools, though not all, have a library. We are both lucky enough to have libraries at our schools, and Kevin’s has brand-spanking-new books that were donated from the states.  Our school is also working with an Engineers Without Borders group from Pennsylvania to start up a computer lab, which may be running by sometime next year.  There is no “gym” usually, but we have a football field and sports take up a significant part of the year.  Our school grounds also include space for agricultural classes to hold “practicals” and learn best practices for planting and tending crops here.  Since my school was built in the 50s, it has a number of half-century-old trees that shade the campus, many of which are mango trees.

A CSS volleyball match

Hopefully that gives you a fairly good idea of the physical aspect of Salone schools. I want to write some more posts describing policies and procedures, the syllabi, standardized exams, and other notable similarities and differences between schools in the US and Salone.  I hope to post a photo or two of the schools sometime.  Feel free to post any questions you’ve got. Thanks!