Food Part One

This could have been Special Days V and VI, but no... This is food, part one, as I expect the subject will come up again.  First and most important, I am now at my permanent site and within a very expensive cab ride of expensive Indian food, so my paneer needs are being better met than I had any right to hope.  (‘Expensive’ is a relative term; I get a great Indian meal for about twenty-five American bucks, and enough to take home to feed me for two or three more meals.  Even with the ten American bucks for the round-trip via the informal taxi system, it’s cheap by US standards.  However, my monthly living allowance is about US$ 160, so it winds up being pricey by Peace Corps standards.)

Sharpening the knife before dispatching
a goat.

Anyway, of greater interest, I suspect and hope, is NAMIBIAN food.  Pretty much anyone in this country will tell you, often without your asking or expressing interest in any way, that Namibians love meat.  It makes absolute sense.  In a desert country – and even the riverine area on the northern border, where the population is densest, doesn’t get much rain for eight months of most years – meat makes sense.  Desert plants are naturally tough, as they need to be to survive that climate, and very difficult for humans to digest.  You need multiple stomachs, or super-digestive juices, like a cow.  Or a goat, sheep, or one of myriad varieties of antelope, like springbok and kudu and eland and so forth.  For humans, letting the livestock eat the grass and scrub and then eating the livestock makes much more sense, personally and ecologically, than trying to grow vegetables with little or no water available.

All of that said, in Namibia today lots of people don’t get to eat much meat.  A significant portion of the population lives in deep poverty, and what little meat they might be able to buy, or be given by more fortunate family members, goes to the father.  Many children survive mainly on porridge, and not a lot of it.  Namibia also suffers a wide income disparity, with a few very wealthy people throwing off the World Bank’s average income calculation, so the country qualifies for less aid in some areas than it would if they used median income instead of average.  Soapbox!

MEAT!

Yeah, more meat.  Ooohg.

When the Peace Corps trainers and homestay families put on a feast, however, they take the task seriously, and pots and plates and platters get LOADED with Namibian specialties, almost all cooked over open flames in the side yard of the training center.  We gathered one sunny Saturday morning (there is virtually no other kind of Saturday morning in May in this country, unless you’re by the coast and get some mist some mornings) in Okahandja and met the two goats in the back of a bakkie (pickup truck) that we (well, not me – no way) would soon be eating.  The chickens were in cardboard boxes in the kitchen.  The knives and machetes and axes were spread about a bit.  The Knorr’s soup mix was in plastic bags from the Pick ‘n’ Pay, and firewood was piled everywhere.



Host families, trainers and Melodia’s lovely mother set to work butchering, chopping, mixing and dropping things into pots according to languages.  My Afrikaans group prepared sausages and potato salad, as well as fatcakes and roosterbrood, two of my favorites.  The former is a variation on Dutch olliebollen, which essentially translates as ‘greaseballs’ and is related to what, in English, we call doughnuts.  Why are we squeamish about calling these things what they are?  They are sweet dough – cake dough – deep fried in fat – fatcakes.  Get over it.  They’re delicious, and if you need calories, as you might in a sparsely-populated land with a long dry season and many kilometers to go before you find a duiker or a neighbor’s cow to eat, they’ve got lots.

I don't know if mopane worms qualify as meat,
but they're certainly protein.

Roasting the bread

The Afrikaans ‘brood’ means ‘bread,’ and ‘rooster’ is more-or-less ‘roasted.’  Roosterbrood is unsweetened dough – bread dough – cooked on the grill, and if you like bread it is rip-roaringly delicious.  That many chefs choose to cut the rolls open and rub in a bit of garlic butter before serving is just that many bonus points.  And then one small contingent of Afrikaans speakers pulled out a portable burner and crèpe pan and started making cinnamon-sugar crèpes, and my joy knew no bounds.

Cakes, frying

The long wall of our training center was lined with tables, each groaning with food.  I walked Wilhelmina, my hostess, along the offerings, holding both our plates and requesting a bit of everything with meat for her, and everything without for myself.  Her plate was dramatically more full, but I’ll tell you – that Damara/Nama spinach dish, scooped up with roosterbrood, was tasty-delicious enough to keep me happy for a week.  Wilhelmina had brought an old ice cream container in which to take home her leftovers, and there was enough in that for two meals.  The amount of work and care and knowledge and kindness that went into this feast was astonishing – and enough to keep me happy for a year or two. 

Lots of learning going on here.

Fast forward a month, and it’s our turn.  The trainees got to host an American feast for the trainers and host families, and we somewhat half-heartedly sorted ourselves into regional groups.  There was talk of tacos, banana pudding and salmon – and eventually there were actual tacos and even a taste of banana pudding.  Salmon proved too daunting. 

I use the term ‘half-heartedly’ with caution, because there was huge enthusiasm for the event.  However, everyone, or almost everyone, was getting pretty sick of flip charts, Powerpoints, role plays and each other after eight weeks of forced together-time.  That said, as we counted off the days, the excitement grew, and when a New Jerseyite promised funnel cakes, ambitions erupted.  The trainers kept reminding us that our host families would want MEAT (and so would the trainers).  As a bona fide vegetarian of 30-plus years’ standing, who had been eating meat daily and cooking it weekly for two months, I gave myself a pass and decided to make macaroni and CHEESE – with BROCCOLI! in it.  There was a definite flurry of vegetable-rich recipes flying about the (very informal) meetings.

Grilling, mostly pizzas

Wilhelmina loved the taco meat, but not the crunchy bits.

Buying enough cheese to feed 100 people mac ‘n’ cheese, albeit a tiny serving each, was a thrill.  Getting together with three friends to make pizza dough, sauce and my casserole was a delight.  Our hostess’ host sister or cousin or niece or someone was a great ‘help,’ her host mother fed everyone soup, cheese sauce is like a soul food for me, and we teased each other and stirred and kneaded and tested and texted our host families that we would be out after curfew.  Then we wrote out a list of *everything* she would need to bring to the party the next day for our kind hostess, packed her host family’s refrigerator, and hopped into her super-kind host father’s car.  He drove us three visitors all over town to deposit us safely with our own kind host families.

Singing, listening, graciously accepting thanks

The next day we met early at the training center, wrangled barbeque grills and a dodgy oven, set up tables and laid out paper plates and plastic forks.  Our host families started showing up around noon, and we were almost ready for them.  In fits and bits, we loaded the tables and everyone took seats in the hall.  While the food cooled (we love cold pizza in America!) our ex-Army volunteer MC’d the appreciation speeches.  Our SoCal marketer led us in prayer, and a couple of musical-theater lovers led a sing-along of Namibian folk songs.  A few people made speeches in their new languages, endeavoring to thank host families for their generosity, kindness and patience, but there aren’t words enough in any language to convey the depth of our gratitude.  Training manager Ben and Host Family Coordinator Lydia spoke, too, and passed out certificates of appreciation to each family present.  Then they (finally) let the host families loose on the buffet. 

A health volunteer with an excellent
feel for pizza sauce.

There really wasn’t a whole lot of meat.  There were beef tacos, hummus and fresh-baked bread from the west, jambalaya or gumbo from our southern volunteers (plus that banana pudding), pizza with a great variety of toppings, funnel cakes and mac ’n’ broc ’n’ cheese (I crumbled potato chips on top of one pan!), brownies, apple cake, and a whole bunch of other things I barely got to taste, as by the time the host families and trainers and staff had gotten theirs, we volunteers were down to scraps.  Even a scrap of that pizza sauce was worth the wait.  The sauce chef learned a thing or two from Italian grandparents.  The gumbo not only had many meaty bits, but also hard-cooked eggs.  I heard from a server that a lot of the Namibian guests were eager for an egg.  I think it’s a great idea for gumbo; it came from a Missourian who’s lived in Louisiana for many years.







Actually, I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a funnel cake in the U.S.

Digging in at last

The funnel-cake-and-gumbo team

After we got everything cleaned up, a few of us went over to the beer garden next door.  I ordered French fries.  They were good.  Later, one of the other volunteers told me that her host dad had liked the macaroni and cheese especially much, once he had pulled all those weird green bits out of it.

You can look here for more photos if you like.