Saturday, February 28, 2015

African Sweet Potatoes


Perhaps I'm inspired by the plethora of root vegetables always around US groceries at this time of year. Or maybe it's the chilly weather that makes it feel like the season.  Or perhaps I'm just craving one of our favorite dishes from our Zim days....  'Tis almost the season to start harvesting these terrific tubers once again!

Meet a vegetable that is out of control in Zimbabwe: the sweet potato.  This crazy plant could just about save the whole country... for a few months anyway.  These giants can grow to well over a foot long and are abundant beyond belief.  Last year our first harvest tackled about a twelfth of the sweet potatoes plants growing in our garden... and we filled a large laundry basket!  My housekeeper, Ziwone, taught me the key to keeping these veggies fresh for a long time: never wash them!  Keeping the dirt on their outsides makes them last in a dark pantry forever....

 
It is a terribly arduous task. Digging up sweet potatoes is no joke and usually requires a long pick-axe or hoe.  Here Jonas tells Kurt where he should be searching for these goodies.  You can tell sweating Kurt appreciates it.


The easy part is replanting sweet potatoes, though.  After the potatoes are dug from the ground, the greens -no matter how torn- are simply covered with a little dirt and watered; they will grow a whole new (always larger) crop the next year!


(Above) my sister Caryn eats a plain, boiled sweet potato during our harvest celebration.  Typical Shona eating involves few ingredients.  Cook a potato.  Eat a potato.



The sweet potato of Zimbabwe is different than any other potato I've ever eaten; it is like no American potato, for sure.  Full of excessive starch and rock-hard white flesh inside, this potato took my child from loving to hating "sweet potatoes" in one taste. I admit that I hated them at first, too.  Even when cooked until they are almost liquid, they maintain a dry, chalk-like texture that can be hard to swallow. Then we realized we just needed some great recipes that did not treat them quite like the potatoes we were used to, and boy did we grow to love these monsters.  Below is one of our favorite recipes, which we often made over the campfire (not required) when our ZESA/electricity went out:   (Check out how you can make them in America, too!)



African Sweet Potato Pancakes
3 eggs
½ cup millk
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 ¼ cup flour
2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon dried thyme
12 oz of finely shredded African sweet potatoes
2 onions, sliced very thinly or finely chopped
Salt and pepper to taste (~3/4 tsp salt and ¼ tsp pepper)

Mix all ingredients together well.  Place in a hot shovel, skillet, or pan that is greased with either butter or oil. Allow first side to brown before flipping.  Brown second side.  Eat as a savory pancake: plain (my favorite!) or topped with sour cream (creme fraiche in Africa) or plain yogurt. 

Note: Give it a try even if you can't get African sweet potatoes... This recipe is great when you use American sweet potatoes and leave out the thyme, or when you replace the African sweet potatoes with a starchy white potato (Idaho or Russet) instead!


Yum!


Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Running on Rumors


It was with a sense of horror that my sister emailed me recently, "What the heck?!!! Is this for real???"

Below her questions she had pasted a link leading to a Zimbabwe Today headline about Disneyland Vic Falls. I, too, was horrified and clicked to read an article about the future of Victoria Falls that included a great deal of commercial venue/mall space/Disneyland-like theme areas.  But here's the thing: In Zim you cannot, cannot, believe everything you read.  Without the same responsibilities of free speech and truth-telling journalism as many other countries enjoy (and I do realize the irony of this, as my lil' ol USA is actually pretty horrible about this, too) Zimbabwean papers are notorious for creating tabloid splashes out of their headlines, dramatizing coverage, and printing the most bizarre stories first.  Imagine that what you see in the tabloids of your First World check-out counter is the only news you have available.


 A friend of mine recently posted a Zim-written article on Facebook.  Like nails on a chalkboard, I read the headline and saw the source.  It didn't matter if the underlying argument was true or not; it was a gross moment to read it and observe the lack of sources, recognize the lack of research, and count the large number of errors in just one little piece of writing.  It was as though I had just gone to correct a high school student's attempt at a news article.  I wanted so deeply to explain to her that when she treated this piece like a legitimate news source, it just encourages and supports a gross way of "informing people."

Still, where do people get their news?  What do you do in a society in which it is easy to question every single piece of information dangling on the wind??

News is a complicated thing in a place run by word of mouth.  In a country in which official press releases are few and assumption and rumor run the gamut, fear and chaos often tell the story.  What is not in the papers is often whispered behind walls and doors, and often evolves into different conversations according to the race of people doing the whispering.  The rumor mill of Zim is a full-time business.  It feeds fear and makes it an undercurrent in every business and home.

The rumor mill used to drive me crazy; my first weeks in Zim were spent in horror as the small circles I came to know revealed their gossip craze.  It was hard to handle and harder to discern fact from fiction until I realized that this is what happens in a society that is never fed the truth.  Like ever. And suspects that everyone, from the government, to the other race of locals, is out to get them. And please note, this is different than in many other countries in which we have research, studies, factual evidence, demographics charts, tables, and statistics.  This is a place in which a stat is considered true if someone bothered to make it up.  Many other countries are challenged in their inaccurate reporting and press issues, but in this situation I am referring to a place that has little statistically to back up any conjecture.

And yet we come back to the question: HOW do people living in a place like Zim get legitimate news? Without analytical research to back up a number of claims made on the situation of the country, its politics, and economy, narrative takes the place of number.  People's individual experiences become much more important to current conversation.  As American anchor Brian Williams could recently tell you, the challenge as individual narrative becomes relevant is how to control stories from turning into snowballing rumor or over-exaggeration for the sake of convincing others.  That I don't have an answer to!  

One of the reasons my blog is fluffy at times is that I refuse to write about something I don't know enough about. I have sooo much to say about politics and culture and the fascinating details of how anthropologically these things play out in a racially segregated system.  But I can't imagine crossing the line into conjecturing what I don't know.

The horrifying thing to me always is that thousands of people, educated enough to read but not quite savy enough to discern or fully identify inflammatory sensationalism (sometimes I fall into this category, too!), read newspapers without a background knowledge of understanding that sometimes the press does not present things in the most transparent way. It's a beast of a subject, whether in a democratic First World nation or in a tiny political entity run by dictatorship.  In all senses, truth is a tricky thing whether we put it in the hands of giant syndicates or our neighbor's neighbor's ear. But tying it to a fear so deeply rooted that it sleeps under everyone's bed/mat? Well, welcome to Zimbabwe!

PS: I get asked about articles often; for the sake of this blog post I just picked the most innocent news topic possible as an example.  If you're curious, here was the article my sister asked about, followed by a piece of my response to her: http://zimbabwe-today.com/2015/01/business/american-investor-to-invest-460m-for-disneyland-vic-falls/


"I do think it's a matter of time before they ruin Vic Falls.  That said, I hugely doubt it would be an actual Disney thing.  I wonder of that guy was just throwing the term around as an example or if he was serious, because the rest of the article never said anything about talks with Disney or anything related to it.  But YES, they are going to build up the falls. 

I think the complication to come -and soon- and what makes me so so so thankful to not be in Zim right now that all signs are pointing to the return of the Zim dollar.  The government is starting to reprint coins and from there, it will only be a matter of months before Zim dollars will be the forced currency... and then everything is down the drain again. People are very skeptical of its success, and it could put the economy to a halt again.  So we'll have to see.  I have no doubt Vic Falls WILL eventually be heavily altered by investors, but most of these giant projects have huge patterns of stalling and delays (there were two projects sort of like this in Harare that are still ongoing). 

The other factor is that Zim has laws about ownership having to be at least 51 percent black Zimbabwean, so it complicates things greatly.  Large companies like KFC have tried to come in in the past and have failed because there is too much "white ownership" to be legally operating in Zim.  So I am doubtful Disney would ever be there under those race based rules.  But other investors?  Yes, if they fit the qualifications... unfortunately these race policies never seem to be in place when China wants to buy things, it seems on the surface anyway pretty much just white Zimbabwean/European/American owners that get pushed away with these policies.  But I could be wrong, as I don't know all the facts- just the whisperings of the locals on this one.  My guess would be that a Chinese company will be heavily involved rather than an American one in Vic Falls investments... But in South Africa?  I could definitely see a Disney happening there eventually....

 This website (I'm familiar with it) never has a lot of facts going with its stories.  It's a rumor based paper, as so many are in Zim.  And there are truths to be found, but a lot of it is not total accuracy...  Just pat yourself on the back you have already seen the Falls when it was a little less spoiled!!"



Sunday, February 22, 2015

On the Lunchtable

One of the things my child misses most about Africa:
"Getting peacocks off the lunch table!"



Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Random Pieces: Toilets in the Rural Areas

It was the little things that signaled a sharp shift in reality for me when we first moved to Africa.  One of my first earliest memories on the continent is seared into my brain for just such a reason: I remember running out of our new house to get the gardener after he had just welcomed us and then  left to go home.  It couldn't wait until tomorrow: I had no idea how to use the toilet. As he probably did many times after, he thought I was crazy for sure.  

People talk all the time about the different pieces of culture, language, and nature they find in their travels, but sometimes just the little things related to infrastructure can remind a person they are in a new reality.  

Here stand a row of "toilets," as they are called.  If these toilets look like they are in the middle of a field, that's because they are.  They belong to a large rural school a kilometer away. What is a kilometer for a student to walk for the bathroom when they have already walked 15 kilometers to get to school?

Except for that Halloween my junior-high self somehow thought it would be a good idea to dress up like a Puffs Kleenex box, here is the most unattractive picture of me ever taken. But it's pretty much one of my only pictures of a Shona "chimbuzi" (toilet).  Set away a few dozen meters from the rest of the homestead buildings, the toilets at many Shona homesteads are separated by sex.  For men it's "varume," and for women, like above, it's labeled "vakadzi."  These bathrooms are literally a tin roof on top of a flat cement slab with a hole in it. Soap and water sit outside for hand washing.