The Top 10 Things I Learned in “The Good Old Days” of Africa

Here are the top ten things I learned while living in Africa:

1.  The things you take for granted, someone else is praying for.  Let’s get the most obvious thing out of the way.  Africa made me grateful.  

There are struggles that generations upon generations of our ancestors dealt with at one time that many of us First Worlders now do not even think about most days.  I have clean water miraculously come out of a spout in my kitchen.  I flush the toilet and never have to see the contents of it again.  I can call 911 and people will actually come; paramedics...  firefighters...  police... A system is in place and people will actually come when I need help.  My First-World doctor will most likely not turn out to be a veterinarian.   I open the refrigerator and assume the electricity has been on all night to keep things cold.  Said refrigerator usually has food in it; and when it doesn’t, I can resource more of it independent of how well the weather treated local crops during the growing season. 

I am grateful for the comforts I grew up not knowing were comforts. Until the day I die I hope I always look at my bed as I have every night since moving to Africa.  I do not sleep on the ground; I do not sleep on bubble wrap, or cardboard, or a piece of wood.  I remember back to when my gardener asked me for my moving boxes so he could sell them to people for beds and I think, “Dang. I’m lucky.”

2. It’s a very very small world.  I thought I knew this lesson, but apparently I didn’t know it well enough. I grew up in a teeny tiny town in the middle of Iowa. I was blown away by the fact that every time I walked through Times Square I ran into someone I knew. “It’s a small world,” I would say.  When we moved to Africa and met coworker Jon, it took us literally two minutes to realize we had both grown up within a fifteen mile radius of one another. “It’s a very small world,” I had said.  But it was on the day I saw a re-sold tee-shirt from my high school being worn by a native African on my street that I truly knew. It’s a very, very small world.

3.  Luxury is having a thermostat.  This may just be the most intelligent thing I ever say so please take note. Luxury is having a thermostat.  My ability to manipulate my surroundings in the First World is. Un. Real. 

4. You only learn as much as you want to. *I started to realize it when I moved to NYC and was amazed that instead of finding worldly-aware citizens, I found people who could tell me ten ways to get to Times Square but could not find the state of Iowa on a map. *I started to realize it when I moved to NYC and found worldly-aware citizens that could discuss the implications of an MFN trade status with China and the effects of trade embargoes on small villages in rural Cuba, but did not know how to buy a subway pass.  *It clicked entirely when I moved abroad and was amazed that instead of finding locally-aware Zimbabweans, I found people who did not know the pangolin -one of the most sought-after animals in their country- even existed, but knew Snooki’s catch-phrases from MTV’s Jersey Shore.  *It clicked entirely when I moved to Africa and found locally-aware Zimbabweans that could discuss the tragedies of the monetary incongruities of white-African versus black-African farm-ownership in Zim, but did not know that the n-word or k-word is not an acceptable term to most English-speaking people.

I found the same tendencies in people wherever I went.   A person can choose what they care about and what is relevant to know in order to navigate daily life.  Getting outside your walls (literally, in the case of walled-Africa) and choosing to learn about the diversity of culture found in your own hometown?  That is entirely up to you.

5. Wealth is not about how much money or possessions you own, it’s entirely about access.  This is not just a sentence; it’s a whole college class.  I am American and I take a few things for granted, feeling poor when I look at my wallet or bank account. But, if I want to buy a car, I get a loan.  If I want to go to school, I get financial aid.  If I want to buy something, I can buy it even before I have the money, instead using a nice little piece of plastic.  I have access to things simply because I am an American with a social security number.  If my Shona housekeeper walked up to a bank to ask for money, she’d be turned away before she even got to speak to someone.  In Zimbabwe, you buy nothing that you do not first have money for.  If you don’t have money, you don’t eat. Want to go to school?  Save up for it first; you cannot borrow your future.  Every time I felt frustrated by my American student-loan debt, something most Africans have no concept of, I had to stop and remember; my thousands of dollars of debt is worth more than the five dollars in the pocket of a Third-World citizen.  It’s all about access.

6. Living in Africa is like  driving with the windows rolled down. You try to orient yourself while challenges come at you at high speeds and your hair whips in your face.  You can feel the air, richer than any oxygen coming out of mechanical dashboard vents, and you can smell the earth.  Sunshine sits warmly on your arms and you feel alive, though perhaps a little disoriented and overwhelmed and nostalgic for the unnameable. Life is raw and real, out in the open.  You will leave refreshed.  But you will look like a mess.

7. The 1950s are alive and well. We first noticed it on the rusty metal pipes that made-up most of Zimbabwe’s playgrounds.  We saw it in the backseats full of bouncing children playing with lighters but sans car seats. We saw it in the 30 year-old medical books our vet-doctor referenced in place of a computer. We saw it in rusty vehicles held together with tape and prayers. We saw it in the gross treatment of staff, as though it was the mid-century American South.  We saw it in kids drinking out of hoses and sunburns welcomed on blistered white children who had never worn sunscreen in their lives. We saw it in the use of non-politically correct words that made our ears blush, and crank cash-registers that made our child’s eyes light-up.  We saw it in the motor-oil used to finger-print us at the police station, and in the misplaced paper files that delayed our many governmental registrations. Just because people know about technological/societal changes does not mean they want to embrace it, or have access to do so.  It’s awesome to talk to a Zimbabwean about “the good old days” –and most people do love that subject- and to realize that the generations I am speaking to in many instances are decades behind our American concepts of “the good old days.” Not everybody got the car or the computer at the same time.

Image by nairalandnews.com

8. Africa has everything.  Cities. Mountains. Deserts. Plains. Waterfalls. Swamps. Forests. Volcanoes. Jungles. Kopies. Cave paintings. Art museums. Suburbs. Upper class. Middle Class. Economically challenged. Orphans. Danger. Safety. Healthy living. Polluted squalor. Democracies. Oligarchies. Tyrannies.  Street vendors. Shopping malls. The wild. The developed.  The clean. The dirty. Penguins and winter.  Pyramids and burning sand dunes. Colonial-formal. Rural-improvisation. Mother Africa has it all.

9. Write your love letters to home.  Nothing will make you feel more like a part of something than when you are separated from it. I never felt so American as when I moved out of its borders.  I adored countless things about my African days. I could gush for weeks.  But I surprisingly discovered –sitting in the differences- what it is I love about home.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  And perhaps a little more grateful, too.

10. You can’t go back.  The bright shining continent of Africa will live with me forever, whether I make it back or not. (And I do plan to!) As Andy Bernard said so accurately on The Office, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”  We are always in the good old days. We’re in them right now. But the tragedy about trying to go back to a place you love is not just a question of geography.  It’s about who was there, when, and how, and why.  My baby grew up in Zim, he ran barefoot climbing mango trees and giggling as we chased giraffes in our jeep and caught frogs in our pool. We felt the spray of Vic Falls and the dry heat of Mana Pools.  We basked on the Zambezi and cuddled orphan babies we eventually cried about putting down.  The ways I got to experience the Great Continent That Could were a gift I will return to a thousand times… but only in my mind.

The Great Zim Childhood

http://matadornetwork.com/life/11-memories-growing-zimbabwe/

I was amused by the above list, sent to me recently by a friend, of eleven memories you have if you grew up in Zim.  It's a great list and I'm sure it could have been fifty pages longer, but it's a good start... Wait, well... that is, if you could afford it...  What so many Zimbabweans able to access things like HIFA and Sam Levy's and this internet page so quickly forget is the fact that this broad blanketed "Zimbabwean childhood" actually only describes about five percent of the population, if that.

As I recently answered a classroom full of excitedly squirming kindergartners all raising their hands with questions about how people lived in Africa, it became very clear very fast that for every question there were two starkly different answers I could give. One involved what people with a lot of money lived like. Answers tended to describe people attempting to live as Westernized of lives as they could while "making do" with the challenges of living in Africa.  And one answer involved what the povertous did to survive life with almost nothing.

I just moved to a "First World" country in which people talk constantly about the stark contrast between the wealthy and the middle class and the poor.  Indeed, the differences do seem extreme... until we remember almost all of us still get to sleep on a bed at night. It puts our differences in stark contrast to those living in true poverty in other parts of the globe.  The list above is fun, but even better?  It reminds most of us about what we seem to forget so quickly... Wherever our childhoods, wow, we're lucky!

To Braii

Happy Africa Day!!  This day falls on America's Memorial Day, so I get the good luck of having two great reasons to celebrate!  And speaking of celebrating... experiencing some beautiful weather today as we celebrate has put me in the mood for one of the most popular southern African past times one can find... the braai.  In South Africa and Zim, the word braai is one of the most beloved words in existence.  As both a verb and a noun, braai refers to the act of grilling meat outside.  And boy, is it an act.

Learning to braai is a right of passage for the upper classes of southern Africa; when we had asked contacts in Zim about what to move with us to the continent the first piece of advice was to go out and buy the best grill possible.  Any get-together that does not involve tea seems to involve alcohol and braaing meat in a situation in which the words "lean" and "still hungry" have no meaning.

Many of the Shona we met were fascinated with this style of cooking raw meat over the fire's heat in the way that we do, either on a grate or in foil.  My housekeeper was fairly horrified -even when it was just in the oven or on the stovetop- as one of the first rules of cooking in her village was to never eat meat that was not boiled first.  I am sure this was a lesson that proved very important for sanitary purposes, but was difficult to get out of her entrenched view despite our refrigeration and washing methods.  We had a number of Harare Shona ask us to teach them how to cook meat over a fire, and I have to be honest- we were surprised! Though fires are used all the time for a variety of foods, including meat, the formal act of braaing was seen by many of the economically challenged Zimbabweans we met  (not trying to overgeneralize here- I'm sure some people don't fall into this category) as being something fancy that was done by upper classes.  Huh, who knew!

Many of the meats used in southern African braais come already seasoned and spiced from the local butcher.  That can be hard to replicate from other parts of the world.  But other meats, like sirloin steaks, come undressed and begging for a little tropical taste.  Here is one of my favorite braai recipes, excellent for plain steaks or chicken breasts alike. It combines the tropical heat of a spicy rub with some sweet pineapple juice perfect for tenderizing.  In celebration of the holiday, I invite you to bring a little Zimbabwe to your plate!

It takes a little ahead-of-time preparation, but it is well worth it...

Cheri's Tropical Heat Meat, Zim Style

4 plain chicken breasts or steaks
1 1/2 cups pineapple juice

1/8 cup brown sugar (Don't want refined sugar?? Try 1/8 cup maple syrup instead!)
1 1/2 tablespoons cayenne pepper (Don't like spice?? Replace this with 2 tablespoons of paprika!)
1 teaspoon oregano
Salt & pepper (I'd say "to taste," but you don't want to taste at this step! I use 1/2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper.)
1 tablespoon garlic powder

1. Stab the meat with a fork and drizzle half of the juice over it; let it sit for twenty minutes. Flip the meat over and drizzle the other half of the juice on the second side; allow it to sit for twenty minutes also.  This adds sweetness, but also tenderizes the meat.

2. Throw away any extra juice run-off.  Mix all of the remaining ingredients in a bowl and then put into a plastic zip bag with the meat. Make sure to squish the meat around in the bag, getting all sides covered with the rub.  Allow this to sit in the bag in the refrigerator for 1-3 hours... Or even overnight if you like!  

3. Cook the meat over the a grill the same way you would grill any other meat.  Make sure to cook the meat properly and thoroughly.  There may be some juice left in the bag after the meat has been removed. You can baste or pour this on the meat during the last half of cooking to add some extra flavor.  Enjoy!!

Ndebele Dolls

Though the smaller Ndebele population is often overshadowed by the larger Shona population when it comes to Zimbabwe, the Ndebele people's presence stretches far into the countries of South Africa, Zim, and Botswana.  I recently had the amazing joy of sharing a few pieces of my Zimbabwean Shona and Ndebele experience with a local kindergarten learning about Africa. I had no problem filling all the time I could get with pictures and stories. But the teacher had requested I bring in a few craft ideas for my time, as well... and suddenly I was stumped.

The arts and crafts presence of the Shona Zimbabwean tends toward beaded necklaces made from drilled seeds, carved wooden objects, imported fabric sales, and soapstone and metal sculptures... not extremely colorful, and not exactly what I should be doing with the average kindergartner!  Then I remembered Ndebele Dolls: These unique dolls are colorful and unique treasures just like their makers, the Northern and Southern Ndebele people.

While dating, it is traditional for a Ndebele suitor to place a doll outside of a young woman's home to indicate his intention to marry her.  The young woman names and cares for a Ndebele doll while preparing to marry, then names her firstborn after the doll.  These dolls are now found exported all over the world, and serve as a huge source of income for some Ndebele people. 

My Ndebele doll is one of my favorite colorful finds from my time in Africa.  You can see why!

The Latest, Overdue

The only surprise I get from this story is that News Day-Zimbabwe had the guts to print it.  This is the kind of stuff that in no way surprises Zimbabweans; millions have no doubt about these things going on behind closed doors, but the undercurrents of fear in Zim keep people from talking out loud about these nightmares of yesterday and today. This broad-scope, politically-motivated massacre that most of us have never heard about is only the tip of the iceberg:

https://www.newsday.co.zw/2015/05/18/mugabe-exposed/

More Fun Pics

 But before this point is fine...

Nyimo Bean Supreme

Here is something you will never hear me say: "Mmm.  I feel like eating some beans right now."  

I eat lots of so-so tasting foods because they are good for me. I'm talking about not-so-terrible-tasting-food-but-not-what-I'd-pick-if-I-had-any-choice-in-the-world food.  Beans fall into this category.  All, that is, except for one.  

When it comes to a little gem called the nyimo bean (pronounced like the famous fish Nemo), you can consider this one of my happiest Zimbabwean discoveries.  As I was reminded when boiling not-so-yummy lima beans this past week, the tantilizing treat of the nyimo bean is one of Africa's best kept secrets.  Nyimo beans are the easiest, cheapest thing to cook, and terribly tasty as part of a meal or anytime-snack by the handful.  

Known as an earth-pea, ground-bean, hog-peanut, Congo-goober, and a number of other things, these morsels of many names are considered a "grain legume" of valuable protein.  Full of affordable protein accessible to any class, these nutrient rich legumes are known for growing in (and improving) marginal to poor soil and are strong against low or inconsistent rainfall levels and high temperatures.  Pretty ideal!  

I was first introduced to nyimos by a teacher visiting an orphanage with me in Harare, who would boil a big pot of them and hand out handfuls to the children.  Pretty soon I had adopted the habit.  As a delicious way to pass out desperately needed protein, nyimo beans and bananas became my method of choice for healthy snacks of starch and protein.  (Both of these foods were especially good because they are kept clean inside of their skins until being eaten!)

The nuts can be eaten fresh from the ground (cracked out of their shell much like a peanut), shelled and roasted, or boiled in slightly salty water- my favorite!  When boiled (usually for about an hour), the salt seeps into the shell and adds just a little flavor around the bean.  When the beans are cooled, the woody-gelatinous shell slides off easily, allowing the beans to be popped straight into the mouth. 

'Tis the season for nyimos right now... If you can find some, do indulge in these goodies.  And then, mail me a few!

 

 (Terrible pictures; sorry.)  Here in a kitchen hut during Shona tea, a large pot of nyimo beans are 
passed around with a tea cup for scooping and serving a tasty pile onto the plate!  

I miss you, nyimo beans!

The Narrative of Africa

Let’s take a minute to talk about something that has been punching me in the gut numerous times each day since the killings in Kenya.  As many of you following African politics know, this past week in Kenya four/five armed terrorists systematically separated the students of a Garissa University student body by religion, executing a total of 147 students who identified themselves as Christians.  As I scroll through my “newsfeed” of 45 ways to bake an onion, crucial camping life hacks, and cute puppies and kittens --I’m not throwing insults here; I do love me some cute puppies-- I am slapped with the lack of attention being given to the blatant brutality of others on the other side of our shrinking globe.  So my question is, why?  After all, I haven’t exactly posted the gruesome images of those nightmarish events, either.  But why haven’t I?

There are oodles of questions and suggestions we can offer up:

-Is it because the story touches on something so dark we don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole? 

-Is it because we see the victims coming from a place in which a lot of people unjustly die anyway?

-Is it because it feels too far away?

-Is it because we are talking about a continent that a number of us can easily ignore in our daily First World lives?

-Is it because we’d like to stay unpolitical or don’t want our nations involved in more efforts overseas?

-Is it because the victims seem so different from some of us? Racially? Religiously? Culturally?

-Is it because we don’t understand the perceived reasons for this injustice and therefore feel too ignorant to join the conversation?

-Is it because we choose whose deaths matter and whose don’t?

These are all interesting questions to juggle and conversations to have, but when we see the attention media pays to tragedies like 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo, we have to go deeper in our understanding of why these traumatic events that will change the face of Kenya forever have gone largely unnoticed by the First World.

I don’t have the answer.  In fact, like many of you, I admit I don’t even like touching the subject.  It’s painful.  And horrifying.  And scarier than ever to me when a group of people is against you not because of what you do, but simply because you exist. That’s the stuff Holocausts are made of. So trust me when I say that I’m processing some of the above questions, as well. 

But perhaps deeper in the heart of all of this is something I call The Narrative of Africa.  It may not at all be that so many of us, media included, don’t care.  But for us in the First World, what is the narrative we have assigned Africa?

 Is it dark?  Scary?  Dirty?  Unsafe?  Uncivilized?  Disease-ridden?  A violent zone of conflict?  Wild? Overwhelming?  In-accessible?  Uneducated?  Hopeless? 

We do have a choice in how we interpret places, what we know about them, and our pursuit of the cultures that find home within them. That is, if we open ourselves to them. 

It’s been interesting to gage reactions of those around me when they learn that I have just moved from Africa and Spain.  Nine times out of ten they will focus on the negatives of Africa before commenting on anything else.  Sometimes this takes the form of political commentary; at other times it involves ebola, famine, or other disease.  --The other one time out of ten is usually regarding elephants, but that is another story for another day!-- As anyone who has returned to the US after living in Africa knows, even the word “Africa” in one’s background gives a person instant street credit.  “Oh, they lived in Africa.  They must be (insert adjective here- most often: brave, interesting, or crazy)." And the funny thing is, that most of the people I speak to say that it is one of the places they’d most like to visit but are sure they will not ever go near.  Though an expensive plane ticket is often the off-the-cuff excuse for this opinion, when pressed further most people stammer on about things like immunizations… and not knowing where to go… or what they would eat… or not wanting to be sick… or how to do it safely… or, or, or, a number of other things that shines a light on their distorted personal narratives of Africa.  Nothing was as telling to me as when we had a set of enthusiastic renters for our Connecticut house suddenly fall through out of the blue at the last second because, when they had told their friends, everyone said that landlords living in Africa could only mean it was a scam. Ask me for twelve more examples; I've got them.  The word "Africa" elicits interesting personal narratives.

So here is my challenge to you.  If you, like me, are bothered by the lack of media attention given to the horrifying events of the past week, or to the 200 missing Nigerian girls, or to the museum attack in Tunisia, or to the Nairobi Westgate shootings, or to the 4 million political killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or to the alarming rates of sexual violence in South Africa, or to the violence that took place just today in Egypt’s Sinai, educate yourself.  Pick a place and shine some light.  For yourself and for others.  Care.

If we can one by one change the Narrative of Africa into a narrative of growth, development, creativity, hope, innovation, resource, and aspiration, THEN we make lost lives matter- independent of how the media pays attention.  When we change the Narrative of Africa to the bustling continent of hope, goodness, and ingenuity that it is, the easier time the world will have in seeing the connections of this challenged continent to other continents.  And even more importantly, the easier time the world will have in recognizing that African lives DO matter.

Take a moment to reflect upon your views of Africa, ways in which you could learn more, pieces of it that confuse or even scare you.  Let’s change the Narrative of Africa one person at a time. 

I'll start; you go next.

  

  

  

  

  

Passports and the Green Mamba

In Zim, everyone knows what a black mamba is.  It's a snake... And not just any snake, but a highly venemous, fast predator related to the cobra.  Here is the last time I (knowingly) crossed paths with one:

We pulled up to a parking lot and there it was, sitting between us and the store....  We went shopping elsewhere.

Now here is what most Zimbabweans refer to as "the green mamba":

The power of your passport can be a fascinating topic when you live abroad and suddenly realize there are number of perks that come with belonging to a certain passport club.  And a number of limitations if you don't... 

The passport is a funny thing.  Well, funny, that is, if you're an American.  In Zimbabwe, it's no laughing matter.  With the help of outspoken leadership and political pariahood, Zimbabwean passport holders have been seeing a lot of closed doors these days.  

The "green mamba," as Zimbabweans call it, stands as a symbol among many locals as a reminder that they are shut out of access to other countries, despite the languages they may speak or their ancestral backgrounds. As one of many examples, my friend -whose grandfather holds the key to a city in Great Britain, fought in their army, and was sent to Zimbabwe as part of his military duty- reminds me that she is being made to feel less and less welcome in her home country of Zim, where her rights are not systematically equal to that of every other citizen in the country. Yet, though she feels the government's pressure to push out those colonialist families who have now called Zimbabwe home for generations, she has no where else to go.  "All we can do," she once told me, "is teach our children to marry someone outside of the country! My husband and I say, 'Don't marry for love!  Find a good passport first!'" Though there is a humor in her speaking, there is also sadness. "We have nowhere else to go.  This is home, eh?  Whether they want us here or not." When times get tough in the country, citizens do not get the same options to move across borders as we Americans confidently have.

Most local Zimbabweans have their own stories. Some involve the limited number of times one can apply for a visa in a foreign country. Some involve getting all the way to the other country before being denied entry. Some involve having to show a great deal of money in  a bank account, as well as proof that one is returning back to Zim eventually with a job waiting for them. Some involve proving familial connections through documentation extending as far as turning in mortgage papers for the homes of in-laws in other countries. And all involve hours of running around and completing interviews to get the correct paperwork and approval stamps.

Visas for those citizens of Zim are an arduous, expensive, full time job to say the least.  As political climates ebb and flow, companies devoted entirely to getting locals visas in other countries are still learning how to jump through hoops decades into service. Travel and moving can be a tricky thing when no one will have you. 

Apparently nobody wants a green mamba knocking on their door....

To view this fascinating graphic up close, check it out at its source: http://awesome.good.is/infographics/how-powerful-is-your-passport/516

More Fun Pics

 Not my picture, but I have seen this man. Pedicure, anyone?

 

The Rise of African Superfoods

A friend reading about the super foods of Africa sent me an article recently that I couldn't agree with more.  Though the continent gets a bad wrap from those who may not fully understand the cuisine, Africa is chocked full of tasty things to eat and undiscovered nutritional treasures. While it's true a number of Africa's little gems are considered hard to harvest on a large scale, modern growing and harvesting methods are slowly opening up the world of African cuisine to those all over the world interested in taking the plunge.... check some out now:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/12/africa/african-superfoods-gastronomy-cuisine/