Muboora

So I don’t get to participate in the Northeast’s fall festivities for yet another year.  Sigh.

But, I am getting my share of pumpkins during my Zim spring.  As this prevalent crop just starts its growing season across the landscape on Shona farms throughout the country, I thought I’d share a new way to enjoy the pumpkin plant for all of you Americans charging towards the quickly upcoming Halloween season.

Cooking a foreign dish can be challenging when ingredients are hard to find.  But this popular Shona dish is sure to be a breeze, as long as you have access to a pumpkin plant.  Do give it a try! Meet Muboora:

When this boastful pumpkin plant decided to take over my herb garden, I decided it was the perfect time to have our housekeeper Ziwone teach me how to cook Muboora.

 

 First Ziwone and I cut the pumpkin leaves from the vine.  If you want the plant to continue growing and producing pumpkins, you can cut one third of the leaves or less without hurting it.  In fact, leaf cutting is like pruning, it encourages new growth. If you do not want the plant growing anymore, you can harvest all the leaves, though the larger ones may be a little tougher and require a little longer to cook.

 

 Once washed (wash well- pumpkin leaves can get very dirty when rain splatters mud on the under-side of the leaves), we pull the tough strings off of the stems.  There are about three on each stem.

 We cut the leaves into smaller pieces that will cook faster.  Fuel, whether it is a gas-top stove or wood fire (more common), is not abundant.  Small pieces cook more efficiently.

 We also chop one beautifully red tomato.  The recipe does not require it, but if you have a small onion, it can be cooked in this recipe also... right before the tomatoes are cooked.

 First we boil the pumpkin leaves in water.

 

 When they are done, drain the leaves well.

 Using the previous pot helps to save dish-washing supplies later.  Here we throw the tomato in with a little olive oil.

 We cook it down until it is slightly mushy.  Yum!  Smells good...

 The cooked pumpkin leaves are mixed back into the pot. We stir and cook a teeny bit longer to blend the taste of the tomato into the leaves.

Salt and pepper to taste, and voila! Eat it with rice, sadza, or alone. This is delicious, uber-healthy muboora.  Try it tonight!

Matamba: The Monkey Orange

As I learned during my first taste recently, the monkey orange, known in Shona as a matamba, is a round fruit the size of a large orange.  Edible to humans and animals, and growing in both tropical and sub-tropical Africa, the “orange” is not really an orange at all, but instead a rock-hard green fruit that ripens into yellow. Once cracked open by blunt force, the inside of the monkey orange proves to be anything but pretty. 

Its gooey, gelatinous insides look like an elephant sneezed around the seeds.  If one can get over the mucous-y texture, the fruit actually tastes mildly genteel. Each sweet and sour tear-drop shaped piece holds a large seed inside of the same shape.  

One eats around the seed, which takes quite a lot of effort to extract, and then spits it out.  

This little known fruit grows on trees known for their superior wood. The fruit trees have recently been introduced to Israel as a potential commercial crop, though my guess is that it will be a hard sell!  The fruit is not really used for many purposes other than direct eating, and -though I’m glad I tried it once- I don’t have a strong desire to scout out this rare fruit again anytime soon.  Good luck, commercial farmers!

Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You: The Internet

Laying the cable: these guys made it to our street!  Finally. 

The irony of using low-tech tools to bring us into the 21st Century...

Looks Like Spring: The Msasa Tree

I find it ironic that for a few moments it almost lines up with America’s fall. When the msasa trees of southern Africa bloom with a bang into an array of purple to red to brown, one knows the season. But here it’s not fall, it’s spring! 

Msasa (mah-sah-sah) trees dot the tropical woodland landscape of Zim, where locals have a great pride for the native species. The msasa is most famous for bearing marks of the seasons right on schedule throughout the year.  The famous tree loses its leaves as the cool season begins gradually in May. In August, the trees are entirely bare, echoing the barren cold weather that is almost at an end.  By late August, as spring blows in, the colorful leaves begin to pop out.  Here the color indicates growing life, rather than the deadening of American leaves that fall in a colorful menagerie.  After 20-25 days, the msasa leaves shift to a dark green color before the tree’s tiny, pungent, green flowers appear.  In April, the 4-6 inch seed pods that hang from the Msasa branches pop open explosively, launching flat seeds in all directions.

The top two pictures are too beautiful to be taken by me! Below are some pictures of our recent visit to the Lake Chivero area.  The severe dryness of the landscape allows the prominent colors of the msasas to take center stage. 

 

As a medium sized tree found only in south-eastern Africa, the msasa grows best in tropical woodlands in which there is a stark difference between the wet and dry season. The tree is known for growing very slowly and therefore is rarely found outside of natural occurrence. The bark of the msasa is useful, as it contains tannin, used for tanning animal hides.  The tree, however, provides an inferior timber. It is considered heavy and too frail to be useful for most wood furniture or building, and is instead most often used for firewood.  I find the tree most useful to the eyes.  Welcome, spring in southern Africa!

 

Guilty Privileged White Girl vs. the Housekeeper Thing

The horrors of having someone wash my car… The nightmare of having an employee fold my towels…  The terror of coming home and realizing someone has washed my dishes… My friends liken it to the pretty girl complaining about having too many boys interested in her. Nobody wants to hear about the horrible struggles of having a housekeeper. And yet, let me admit to you while I hope you attempt to have a teeny bit of sympathy, having staff has not been easy for this American girl. 

Let me begin this discussion with a little info.  Most housekeepers, nannies, and gardeners in my country are Shona or Ndebele.  They are referred to as “staff” or “domestics” here.  But every once in a while a local white will slip and refer to their staff as “servants” or refer to an employer as an “owner.”  This chokes me every time. Minimum wage is $90 a month for these positions, though we have heard oodles of stories in which staff have worked for their negligent employers for up to a year without being paid.  Most people in these positions are paid somewhere between $100-$150 per month. Staff that have been with the same employers for a long time have worked their way up to receiving more than that.

Let me also begin this discussion I’ve carefully avoided for a year by explaining to you that the last movie my husband and I watched before moving to Africa was a little thing called, “The Help.”  (If you haven’t seen this, do.)

Arriving in our African country was like landing in America’s most segregated 1950’s South.  Staff are treated in a variety of ways; most of the time I have to keep my mouth shut and remember that I cannot save the world or undo someone’s lifetime of racism in a single comment.  But I have seen enough to write a sequel to the movie. 

We arrived on the continent knowing that having staff to upkeep the school-lent house was expected.  As energetic do-it-yourselfers, this was uncomfortable to us.  We love to cook and garden and sew.  We call these things hobbies, not work.  But we gave ourselves a pep talk on providing employment for others and started with a gardener and housekeeper. 

After a few months, we dismissed the fulltime housekeeper for about twenty reasons too long to list.  To be brief and impersonal, our shipment of furniture had not yet arrived. She was done cleaning the house thoroughly every day within two hours.  And meanwhile we were on the verge of bankruptcy because of our botched house sale in the US.  Here we were scraping change to pay a mortgage while I was paying someone to wash my oven daily.  She had to go, though I cried a lot over the move and didn’t rest til we’d found her another position.  

I discussed my torturous trepidations with a variety of others a hundred times over.

Other: “You are employing someone.  That’s huge in a country with 95 percent unemployment.”

Me: “But you’re participating in a system you find sickening.”

Other: “But at least your staff have a job.  And you treat them far better than most people.”

Me: “But too many people pat themselves on the back about that. You meanwhile know they deserve more money.  They’d be horrified if they knew how much money you’ve made so far in life.”

Other: “With just a few hundred dollars a month, you are actually supporting more like twenty or thirty people, as most of their family doesn’t have a job. That’s nothing to feel guilty about. Besides, you can’t explain things like student loan debt or a US mortgage to your employees.”

Me: “But I’m still more privileged despite these debts.”

Other: “It’s all about perspective.  You’re feeling too guilty.  You’re actually less privileged because of your debts.  You’re working away to repay while we Africans don’t have that hanging over our heads.  We just have a clean slate to build from.”

Me: “But you also can’t help but feel guilty when you tell your staff you wish you could pay them more but can’t, while you meanwhile spend more on groceries than double their salary. That feels hypocritical, even when you really seriously can’t pay more.”

Other: “Speaking of hypocritical, you are paying ‘white people prices’ that support others.  You can’t get food or other things as cheaply.  This is one of the most expensive African countries to live in.  Your staff knows how to live on one hundred dollars a month quite well.”

Me: “Yes, it’s called malnutrition.”

Other: “No, it’s called culture.  If you paid your staff five times what you pay them now, they would still eat the same foods.”

Me: “That seems like a big assumption, that poverty is preferred because it’s part of ‘culture’.”

Other: “They don’t see it as poverty, though. Besides, you provide some food, housing, medicine, hand-me-downs, health insurance and electricity. These are things they would not otherwise have.”

Me: “Ugg.  And really I only want to be responsible for my family!  Look at how much more I worry about with staff.  Others’ lives are in my hands.  I can’t even bake someone cookies with margarine without feeling personally responsible for the injury to their heart health. I’d rather just worry about finding time to cut the lawn.”

Other: “Yeah, but your time is worth much more per hour than theirs.  You put a higher value on your time.”

Me: “That sounds like a horribly aristocratic thing to say.”

Other: “I mean that the time it takes you to do the dishes yourself in a week is far more precious than just paying someone a small amount to do what you would charge much more for.  Your time with your son is worth a lot.”

Me: “Meanwhile, my child is being called, “Little Gentleman” by the staff’s children. And he’s watching his mother tell others how she wants things, even though they live here, too.”

Other: “But you’re supposed to dictate things. It’s your house.”

Me: “But it doesn’t feel that way at all when I’m constantly surrounded by others. Yesterday I had four people working on the house and yard around me as I played outside.  The staff’s kids are on my property and need supervision, so I end up having to play with them.  And I didn’t sign up to be a live-in babysitter, especially when I don’t have the right to tell my staff how to raise their kids.”

Other: “But you do have the right. It’s your property. If you want the kids staying in back, they should do that.”

Me: “While meanwhile my child gets to hang out with the gardener? That doesn’t seem fair. Don’t you think my staff would rather be playing with their kids?”

Other: “No, they want to be feeding their kids. Sure, anyone would kill for the opportunity to have a few years off from housework while their kid was little. So don’t complain about what you get.  But at the same time your husband isn’t getting to play with his kid.  He has to work and is grateful for his job, just like your staff is.”

The important but painful conversation left me feeling sick every time. Sometimes it brought out people’s lazy sides.  Or their selfish sides.  Or worst, their racist sides.  I finally stopped having the conversation out loud and chewed on it by myself.  I hemmed and hawed for five months.  I tortured myself daily as my child tugged on my pants for attention while I stood at the sink doing dishes myself.  I debated while I interrupted our baseball game to switch the laundry.  I questioned as I stopped reading to my child to take cookies out of the oven.  I wondered as I ran from Jonas’ bathtub to answer the gate.  I pondered over and over, stuck in a muddy mess somewhere that buried the fine line between my selfishness and guilt, my privilege and burdensome American debt, my parenting ideals and capability as a competent independent woman.

After we got our American house rented and sat back on stable financial ground, the subject of bringing a housekeeper in came up once again.  And finally we made the decision.  Less for our own mental comfort and more for our staff and child’s physical comforts, we decided.  No one would raise our child for us.  We would never have a nanny.  Or anyone who plays with my child while her own are fending for themselves.  Jonas, while adoring our staff, will not be raised by someone other than his parents, as so many children in this country are.  Every shoelace that needs to be tied, every nose that needs to be wiped, every toy that has to be picked up, that’s me.  All me.  My job. 

But a housekeeper? Oh, alright... 

Four months ago we settled on a half-time housekeeper, Ziwone, who we pay a fulltime salary.  And so we live with five other people on our property, never quite alone.  I still do things like cooking and throwing a load of laundry into the machine.  And my child knows who takes care of him.  And that if the housekeeper isn’t around, I know where the broom is. 

I am breathing-in the luxury on most days.  After all, I haven’t washed a dish in four months.  But I’m still feeling guilty and uncomfortable on other days.  And so the debate continues, most likely until the day we move away…

Grieving Pretty

I am so angry.

And so very heartbroken. 

Usually death affects us personally because it reminds us of our own mortality. Scary unknowns.  The fleeting state of life. Grief for those left behind. But today death touched me in a new way. It left me flaming mad.  And drenched in a watery, exhausted sadness. 

My special baby at the orphanage died.  

Her name was Pretty.  

Pretty, found on the side of a road in our city, who I had first met when she was five days old. Pretty, who I bothered the staff with too many times.  Pretty, who we bought diapers for and brought clothes to.  Pretty, who was not thriving.  Pretty, who I had instructed the “care workers” to take to the doctor for the obvious, severe thrush infection in her mouth identical to one my baby had had years before. Pretty, who had the same diaper on after friend Julie and I returned to the orphanage four days after it was put on her.  Pretty, who was so malnourished that after those four days the diaper was bone dry.  Pretty, who I was not allowed to take to the doctor. Pretty, who we scoured the orphanage to find bottles for.  Pretty, who we tried desperately to cool off in her constantly fevered, bundled state.  Pretty, who lay in her crib untouched by staff for days. Pretty,who I was not allowed to adopt because I am foreign. 

I can’t save the world, but I definitely didn’t save Pretty.

The irony is hitting me hard.  I was about to post a piece of writing I entitled, “The Communal Child.”  It was about the parenting I’ve seen in my African country.  And how the saying “it takes a village” has never been more true than here.  But it’s in the trash. Because today is all about what happens when people do not take personal responsibility in their jobs, in their parenting, or in their care for a child.

Pretty is one of thousands.  But I will console myself that she is finally out of the system.  And that there are at least a few people crying for her sake tonight.  Fly away fast, little girl.

  

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