Kipilefti

A more cheerful post about food. How I cook, and what I cook.

I have two cooking options available to me here in Makete. The one I use most is the charcoal stove (or jiko in Swahili). It’s sort of hourglass-shaped and squat. I fill it with charcoal, dump some kerosene over the charcoal, light it, and then leave the kitchen for five to ten minutes while the kerosene burns out, leaving hot coals to cook over. If I keep feeding it it lasts indefinitely, and it covers the kitchen in a delicate yet attractive layer of ash. It’s nice because, after that initial flare-up and burn-off, it doesn’t smell like kerosene, and because it gets very hot for an extended period of time. More irritating is that I can’t control the heat: up until it uses up most of the coals, it’s on high heat, which makes sauteing anything an adventure in stirring constantly. I actually have two charcoal jikos: a larger, somewhat broken one that was in the house when I moved in, and a small non-broken one that I bought myself.

The second cooking option is the kerosene stove, which I’ve only used once since it was purchased. I may start using it more when time is of the essence, but right now I’ve got plenty of time to feed the charcoal jiko and nothing better to do. I hate the smell of kerosene but I’ve been assured that once school starts I’ll be grateful for its quick light-to-use time: basically you crank up the wicks, light them, put the cover on, and you’re ready to go.

Lately I’ve been cooking a lot of beans and rice. It sounds boring but it really isn’t: I make a sort of sauce out of the beans, and whenever I cook rice I do it Tanzanian style, with a little oil, a little salt, and some cardamom. The rice is delicious enough to eat on its own, and I do that too when I forget to start soaking the beans the night before. I also eat a lot of fresh produce from the market that’s a short walk from my house. Avocadoes, mangoes, and plums are all in season right now, and I eat a ton of all of them. They’re all smaller than their U.S. counterparts but so much more flavorful and delicious! The mangoes in particular are amazing, although since they need a bit more work to eat I find myself eating more plums.

On my first shopping trip here in Makete I bought one of the vacuum-flask thermoses that Tanzanians use to keep things hot, and since then it’s had tea in it almost all the time. I feel weird if I don’t have tea constantly available, and I’ve been drinking a lot of it, for several reasons. First, it’s delicious! Second, it’s warm, and I’m often cold here. Third, it doesn’t require filtering to make it taste good, like the drinking water does.

The last integral part of my diet is peanuts. I’ve been eating a *ton* of peanuts: I buy a liter of raw ones at the market for $1 or so and then roast them over the charcoal jiko and eat them like fatty, protein-tastic popcorn. They’re delicious, although the aforementioned heat control problem with the jiko means that sometimes they get kind of burned. Still delicious, though.

So the problem I’ve been encountering is that my default behavior is to curl up in bed with a book and maybe a cup of tea. If there’s something else that has to be done, be it something no fun like washing handkerchiefs (it’s gross, trust me) or something I want to do like going for a walk or practicing my mandolin, I have to force my inert self to put down the book and get out of bed and do it.

I’ve been doing okay with the chores that need to be done–washing clothes, washing dishes. I’ve been kind of enjoying cooking, which is good because it takes for-frickin’-ever if you’re doing it on a charcoal stove. First you have to light the charcoal (which I do by dousing it in kerosene and then leaving the room for five minutes while it flames down), then you have to wait for it to be a solid enough fire to put a pot on, and then it’s impossible to control the heat so you just have to work with the high heat until it burns itself out. So that’s good times.

I’ve been practicing the mandolin, too, since that’s an activity I can do by myself in my room with no electricity.

I’ve had less luck with making myself go out for walks. Partly it’s that preparation is involved–I have to put on sunscreen and bring an umbrella, due to the unpredictability of the weather at this time of year. Partly it’s that when I walk, I walk to be alone, but anywhere I would walk here there are people. I should still go out, though: walking makes me feel better. Every day I tell myself I’ll start tomorrow, and make excuses.

And I’ve had way less luck with talking to Tanzanians. I’ve chatted with the neighbors a little, and with people at the market when I’m buying stuff. I think I’m relegating this to the beginning of January when classes start (on the fifth for Form IV and the twelfth for everyone else) and I’ll be forced into socialization with the teachers and students. Until then I’m happy enough to hermit in my house and I’ve been advised by PCVs to do what makes me happy, so that’s that.

I’ve been rather unsuccessful, too, at not thinking about home and family and friends and the things that I really miss, now that I’m alone at site in a big empty house. I’ve been really trying not to think about Christmas at home because it’s a surefire way to make myself unhappy but there I go thinking about it again. Christmas here will be fun, I’m sure–I’ll be spending it with other PCVs and we always have a good time–but it will be the first Christmas I haven’t spent with my family and that’s really hard to think about.

One big difference between Morogoro and Makete: in Moro, bathing was much easier! It’s “summer” here and still cold enough in my house that I’m leery of taking off warm clothes and even leerier of dumping soon-to-be-cold water on myself! But I smelled pretty funny this morning, so I took a shower, and now I’m in bed under all my blankets and I was going to go get another liter of plums at the market but I’m too cold to get out of bed! I think that in the winter I’m just going to smell funny. Bathing is totally not worth it! I’m also thinking of cutting my hair to shoulder length to make it easier to care for, but there’s nowhere here to get a decent haircut, so I probably won’t. I’ll just keep it up all the time.

So a little more about my site: Makete is a big enough town to be on the tourist map of Tanzania my dad gave me when he passed through Moro, but the road it’s on is pretty terrible. It’s 110 kilometers out of Njombe but the bus ride takes five hours, and I hear it’ll only get worse when the serious rains start. Right now we have a thunderstorm every couple days and get torrential downpours for an hour or two, but during the rainy season I guess it’s like that all the time. A PCV I was talking to said that clothes never dry. I am not looking forward to it!

Usually, from the windows at the back of my house I can see down across the valley and to the mountains beyond the valley. There are a few ranks of mountains that are visible in clear weather. Sometimes clouds drift between the distant mountains. When the rain comes I can’t even see the valley, much less the mountains beyond.

There’s a road that runs sort of behind my house. There are a couple houses in between but I can still see people and motorcycles and lots of donkeys passing through at all hours. Sometimes at night the donkeys decide to express their opinions, loudly.

Also loud are the large crow-type birds that love to go through the food waste I toss off the porch (one advantage of the cold: nothing smells! Although perhaps that’s also an advantage of the fact that I’ve been sick since I got here…). They’re somewhere between crow and raven sized and it looks like they’re wearing little white vests. I like them when I see them from far away but from close up they seem too maliciously intelligent.

Being in Njombe with other PCVs is so relaxing and fun. I really don’t want to go back to my empty site! At least I have a ton of stuff I’ve bought to fill the house up a little bit (although, stupidly, I left most of my money at home. What was I thinking?!). It’s a five-hour ride on a cramped bus on a terrible road to site, and it’s super expensive for Tanzanian transport (around $9), so I don’t think I’ll be coming into town too often. I will come back for Christmas with everyone here, because spending Christmas at site alone would be no fun whatsoever. We’re thinking of going to Iringa but we might just hang out at someone’s house here. Who knows…

But tomorrow morning I’m going back to site, and I’ll try to make my house into a home, and get to know my neighbors and all the women who fetch water from right outside my kitchen window. It should be do-able, and maybe even fun…

Very quickly: house is huge and empty and was devoid of anything except furniture when I arrived. It’s a replacement site so I’d been expecting at least some kitchen stuff and sheets and a blanket but I guess it walked off with Tanzanians, which really sucks. The back doorhandle is broken and doesn’t lock so I have to use the (also broken) deadbolt to secure it. When I first got there I had to carry all my luggage over and then I found the broken door and just sort of collapsed against it and cried, but things have improved. I bought some things at the market but the house is still desolate (there are THREE bedrooms because it was built for a family). The Peace Corps definitely does not give us enough money for settling in. It’s disheartening.

On the plus side, I do have a beautiful view of the mountains, and the roof doesn’t leak.

So an awful lot has happened since I last wrote:

• I swore to protect the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic, so I am now a Peace Corps Volunteer instead of a Peace Corps Trainee.
• I said goodbye to my homestay family.
• After swearing-in in Morogoro we were bused to Dar (except for the two placed in Moro) and had a free day there before our early-morning departure. I wandered the city with Anita, Rebecca, Aleisha, and later Chris; we went to the fabric district (my favorite place ever), an ice cream shop, the Indian area, and a Lebanese place. It was a great last day in civilization-ish.
• The next day we woke at 3.30 A.M. to get our luggage out to a pick-up area so we could load it onto a shuttle bus to the bus terminal so we could unload it again so we could load it onto our buses to large cities at various distances from our sites. At the bus station, I was standing with my bags and a Tanzanian man lunged towards my face and kissed me. I pushed him away and yelled in Swahili but he seemed pretty pleased with himself. A lot of the female PCVs strongly dislike Tanzanian men and I’m beginning to see where they’re coming from.
• Also at the bus station, a thief grabbed my laptop power cable out of my backpack but the porter hauling my bags was off like a shot and retrieved it for me.
• And then an eleven-hour bus ride. The bus left at 6.30 A.M. and arrived in Njombe at 5.30 A.M. We were met by two of the zillion or so PCVs posted in this region. We stayed at a hotel for the night.
• The next morning Bret (the PCV from our group who lives even farther out than I do) and I got up early and had an early breakfast so we could get our bags to the bus station to catch the 9 A.M. bus to our towns.
• At 11 we were still waiting, and got news that the bus had had a flat tire and would not be coming.
• At 11.30, Bret’s headmaster managed to get him and all his stuff wedged into a dala-dala.
• At 1 I saw the other PCVs, who had gotten up at a reasonable time and had a leisurely breakfast and visited the district commissioner’s office, across the street, and went over and had a minor breakdown, then talked myself out of it. It would be fine, I told myself. We’d get there somehow and tonight I’d be in my own house, alone, and I’d be able to do whatever I wanted without having to smile to make someone else feel better. I went back to the bus stand to stand awkwardly with my headmaster.
• Finally, at 2, me and my headmaster and my luggage and another woman and two kids and other luggage and a bag of shoes and some chickens were crammed into the back of a Landcruiser and we were off. I was between the other woman and the bag of shoes, and every bump on the dirt road pushed the luggage towards us, making our already small leg room even smaller. But I could watch the beautiful mountains out the window, and we were going towards my house. Maybe when we got there it would be light enough to unpack (the electricity was out, my headmaster had said).
• At 7 we arrived, finally, at my school. Makete is beautiful, with great views of the surrounding mountains. We unloaded my luggage…into my headmaster’s house. I asked him when I would move into my house. He told me in a few days. I had to take some time out of the conversation to keep myself from breaking down: the only thing that had kept me going was that that night I would be able to be in my own house, would finally stop living out of a suitcase, would finally have a home, for the first time in three months.
• I calmed down and told him that I wanted to move in that night. That was not possible, he said, because there was a woman living in my house, a temporary teacher, and “of course” (his favorite phrase)…something about salary and she was supposed to move out and I just didn’t care. I told him I wanted to move in that night. He said that he would go talk to the woman.
• He came back, said I would move in the next morning. I had to calm down again, but tried to tell myself that was better than nothing. So last night I slept in a hotel and, thankfully, was alone. In the morning it seems better but I still get pissed off when I think about it. He knew when I was coming, he knew that I would want to move into my house, and he didn’t tell me. I do not feel that we have gotten off on the right foot.

Briefly, there’s now a link on the left about how and why you should send me mail. I’m really looking forward to the cold climate and mosquito-less-ness (and maybe, I hear, CHEESE) of Makete. More later.

I’ll be where I expected (and hoped) to be placed, in Makete, halfway between Njombe and Mbeya on an apparently AWFUL road, in the mountains! Really high in the mountains! It will be cold! Once I have an address, send me blankets and sweaters! I’m super excited.

Eleven of our thirty-one person class got placed in the Iringa region and six in the neighboring Mbeya region, and there are already a ton of PCVs around, so I should be seeing a lot of people, which is great.

ETA: I’ll be teaching ICT at an O-level government school.

Shadow was good; relaxing. We woke up at 5 to catch the 6 A.M. bus out of Mpwapwa. On the way out, I watched the sun rising over the mountains and desert. Baobab trees gave way to acacia, and then I blinked and we were back in the lush greenery of Morogoro, only briefly before continuing on to Dar, where I am now.

It’s very strange to be back in Dar, its weather like D.C. in the summer but without most of the air conditioning. We’re staying at the same place we started, the same place we wound up at when we arrived in country. It seems like it’s been so long but no time at all. We even got the same lunch from the embassy that we got on our first day here. We apprciate the mediocre pizza and burgers a lot more now!

Site announcements tomorrow. Updates as events warrant.

Woke up early so I could wait at our pick-up point and then at the bus stand (the bus was an hour late) for the bus out to our shadow site. Bill and I were squished into the back seat with four other people. When the bus went over bumps I left the seat, and the seat edged out from the seat back. When the gap reached a width of a foot or we stopped, we shoved the seat back in.

We left at 9.30 (the scheduled departure was 8.30). Half the trip was on a paved road and we went fast, trying to make up for lost time. I stared out the window over the shoulder of the girl sitting next to me, watching baobabs and donkeys and the arid desert rushing by. The baobabs are flowering and fruiting, white and green. The rains have just started.