Filling the food hole

Tuesday, 24 August 2010

Food was a hard problem during my home stay. When I first arrived at our training site, the elderly patriarch of my family had just passed away. Scores of relatives had come from all over Cameroon and even France for the funeral. We had a feast. I mentioned in an earlier post that we slaughtered a pig that had been named in honor of me and my next-door neighbor (and fellow PC trainee). This spectacle was not so hard to watch. It took four or five men to hog tie the porky, and with their strength and the help of a large, sharp knife, sawing through the neck was a relatively quick process that I think did not inflict an inordinate amount of suffering.

The goat slaughter the next night was more heart-wrenching. Then, only my deaf-mute home- stay uncle was on the scene for the kill. Although the goat was much smaller and easier to handle, it was still a handful for one man to manage by himself in the dark. He had to both hold down the animal and cut through its jugular – and with a smaller, duller knife, at that. Rather than severing the head, he just slit its throat and left it to bleed to death. It took awhile before the little maa-maa was out of its misery. It was sad, but there wasn’t much time to reflect, as my family and I had a couple hundred fish to gut.

After the feast and funerary celebration, the deluge of victuals slowed to a trickle. PC compensated our home stay families amply for food, and we were supposed to have two meals each weekday and three meals on weekends with our Cameroonian kin. I got only dinner, and until the last couple weeks of my stay when we ate rice, the evening repast was cold, congealed corn couscous and cold, often slimy sauce.

For someone who’s hungry all the time even when there’s abundance, this time of famine was difficult to adjust to. At first, I just endured. Then, one of the volunteers who showed up to help train us newbies convinced the owner of our local watering hole to start making pizza sandwiches for us to buy. What a luxury! You, too, can try this at home. All you need is a baguette, a small can of tomato paste, a couple triangles of Vache Qui Rit processed cheese food, and some poor-quality salami. In the States, such a processed, pre-packaged concoction would gross me out. But tastes change according to what’s available. In Africa, pizza sandwiches are mmm, mmm good. (So is Kool Aid, which I hated in the US. Here, the brand is Foster Clark’s, and it comes in flavors of all kinds of locally available fruit: mandarin, pineapple, mango, passion fruit, guava. When the water from your filter tastes like a PVC pipe, a little added fruitiness goes a long way. And crumbly, store-bought cookies? I never touched them at home, but in Cameroon, where baking in an iron pot can be onerous, I seek out such delights.)

Pizza sandwiches filled the hole for awhile, but I knew I couldn’t eat them all the time. I was wary, however, of street food. PC medical staff had painted scary pictures of what microbes lurked in every morsel one might be tempted to buy off a tray balanced effortlessly on some small child’s head. But then I traveled to visit my post for the first time, and I had no choice but to eat street food on the road. It was fabulous! You don’t even have to get off the prison bus to buy dinner. When it stops for passengers to honor the muezzin’s call to prayer, the kids with trays of boiled eggs and bread, grilled prunes and plantains, oranges, bananas, beignets, and cookies come right to your window. (Prunes might be my new favorite food. They’re small purple, pink, or white, oblong, fist-sized fruits whose buttery, savory, slightly sour flesh ranges from ecru to lime green.)

After site visit, I was never hungry again. I found a bean “mommy” in our training village at whose shack I ate beans and beignets every morning. When she didn’t show up, I got a bean sandwich from another mommy down the road. I started making sandwiches myself for dinner before I went home – usually egg and avocado, but as avocado season slipped away, egg and banana sandwiches it was. (People eat banana custard, don’t they? And isn’t that just eggs and bananas, too?) I tried not to eat too many bananas in the States because they’re shipped from so far away, and besides, who would eat more than one of any kind of fruit or vegetable in a day, anyway? In my training village, I thought nothing of eating three to five bananas every day. Sometimes, they were the only fresh food I could find.

When Model School started, where all the education trainees completed student teaching, vendors appeared on campus with fish pockets (they’re a bit like samosas), and a guy I called Willy Wonka opened a shack with more varieties of cookies than I’ve seen even in the States. My epicurean options were expanding. Cookies and fish pockets made mouth happy.