Being back home

Malawi-Style Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

Ingredients Pie Crust:
1 Cup flour
1/4 Teaspoon salt
4-5 Tablespoons margarine
1-2 Tablespoons water

Combine dry ingredients, then cut in margarine with a fork until it forms small balls, add water. Use your hands to form the pastry into a big ball, then use a glass bottle to roll it out into a circle form. Grease your frying pan, and set the pastry in the pan.

Ingredients quiche:
2 eggs
4 Tablespoons milk powder, mixed into one cup of water
1/4 Teaspoon salt
1/2 Cup chopped broccoli (or greens if you don’t grow broccoli)
1 Cup cheddar
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/8 Cup onions, diced
Enough olive oil (or regular oil) to coat pan

Beat together eggs and milk in a bowl, set aside. Sauté onions in olive oil for about five minutes, add garlic and broccoli and sauté for five more minutes. Sprinkle on salt, then add sauté to eggs and milk. Pour whole mixture into pie pastry. Put over very few coals, then either put metal water filter lid or pan lid or tin foil over top, and pile on more coals. Bake for 30 minutes, or until knife stuck in comes out clean. Make sure you keep a small fire going on the side for continuous coals.

American-Style Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

Use same ingredients as Malawi-Style Broccoli Cheddar Quiche, except if you prefer substitute butter for margarine, and whole milk for milk powder. Pre-heat oven to 425 F. Use a well-floured rolling pin to roll out pastry, and place pastry in a pie tin. Follow same instructions for filling, and then place filling in pastry and pie-tin in oven. Bake at 425 F for 15 min, and then lower temperature to 350 F and bake for another 30 min until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Busy-Day Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

Go to local grocery store. Buy broccoli cheddar quiche from frozen food section. Follow directions on box.


At the end of your Peace Corps service, at the Close Of Service conference, Peace Corps staff present a workshop on readjusting to life in America. During the workshop you are told that the two questions you will invariably be asked on coming home are “What was it like living in Malawi?” and “How does it feel to be home?”. They suggested that unless you wanted to spend three days straight answering these questions (roughly the amount of time it would take to accurately and fully explain the complexities) you come up with a neat one or two sentence synopsis. I don’t think I ever really figured one out for the first question, but for the second I came up with “It’s great to be back, but also a little bit strange,” and, although short, that has turned out to be surprisingly accurate.
It’s fairly difficult to quantify how nice it is to be back home. It’s wonderful to be around my friends and family again, to have ease of communication, to have electricity that stays on consistently, to have a wide variety of foods at my disposal, to be able to show my knees, and especially to be able to walk around in relative anonymity and not have strangers calling out to me requesting money or my hand in marriage.
As for the “strange” it’s probably not a shock to anyone that coming from one culture to a vastly different one after three years would be difficult, but I don’t think even I realized exactly quite how complex it would be. For one thing, I completely underestimated how much I’ve missed in the past three years. To illustrate my point, I have compiled a by-no-means-comprehensive list of things I missed out on while I was in Malawi: Obama getting elected, Twitter, That YouTube video, Lady Gaga, Everyone having a Smartphone, 3d movies, The Tea Party, That other YouTube video, Justin Beiber, Electric cars, The Arnold Schwarzeneger scandal, The Anthony Wiener (really?!) scandal, The Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, That other other YouTube video, you know, the one with the cute animal/stupid antics/girl who really really really can’t sing.
Trying to catch up on all of this leads to fun moments like me screaming and backing away from the MacBook pro mousepad (it moves in mysterious ways). Or me responding simply with “uhhhhh” when the nice man at the phone store asked me “and what were you looking for today?” Or making comments like, “well, I don’t really have a particular opinion, but I do prefer Earl Grey, no milk, no sugar, why?” during political discussions.
Something else that has been really strange has been seeing which negative portions of Malawian culture that I thought I was escaping from actually exist even here in America. For example, I understand why, in Malawi, politicians have to swear they aren’t witches, I don’t quite understand why Michelle Bachman does. I understand why, in Malawi, the government is currently trying to corrupt the constitution, and restrict voter rights, I don’t understand why so many states are, as well. And I really don’t understand why “The Onion” (which ran the headline ‘congress debates whether we should have economic ruin’ during the entire manufactured debt crisis) has suddenly become the most accurate paper in America.
 However, what is strangest for me about being back in America is that it is quite simply odd to not be in Malawi. It’s odd to have formed a life and routine for yourself in one place, and then to suddenly not be there. What has made this even tougher is that about a month after I left Malawi there were a number of protests against the Democratic People’s Party (DPP, the ruling party) where violence erupted, leaving political buildings burned, shops looted, and twenty people dead, half of those in Karonga and Mzuzu.
The protests have come as a result of a number of bad policies the president has been enforcing, but the most prominent are the fact that he is quite obviously making moves to try to stay in power for a third term, something that blatantly violates the constitution; that he has been paying civil servants in a manner that is best described as ‘sporadic’ for the past few months; and that he has refused to float the currency, something that has virtually eliminated the country’s ability to buy Foreign Exchange, resulting in a country-wide gas crisis that is driving inflation through the roof.
While a small part of me is happy to be safe and secure in America, a much larger part of me feels that I should still be back there. Malawi was my home for three years, and it’s strange to have to be calling people on Skype, sifting through blogs, the AP, and looking at posts on Facebook to see what is going on. While things have calmed down, I’m still worried about everyone over there (not so much in terms of safety, no one’s going to bother driving along the road to my village no matter how violent they get, it just wouldn’t be worth it). I’m worried about what will happen to them, and to their livelihoods if the country collapses more than it already has.
Outside of missing being in Malawi, perhaps the most difficult thing about returning to America has been adjusting to the American pace of life. Back in Malawi, when I thought about returning home, I pictured this idyllic life where I incorporated the best of Malawian culture (carrying stuff on your head instead of your back, eating fresh and local, chatting with all your neighbors, walking or biking most places) with the ease of American life (using a stove, going out to fun places to hang, enjoying parks and paved roads.)
When I got home, I was surprised at how accessible such a life was to me. It seems that the number of bike paths has almost doubled since I was gone, and we have a nifty new farmer’s market in Arlington that is about 1,000 times more pleasant than a supermarket (it’s outdoors and features a weekly musician and there’s more human interactions AND they let you sample their artisinal cheeses).
Yet, despite all of this, I find myself driving places or running out to the grocery store to pick something up. In this idyllic life that I had pictured for myself, I forgot that, as much as it’s easier to bake bread in an oven rather than over a fire, it’s even easier to pop all of the ingredients into a bread maker and easier still to buy the bread at the store. And surrounded by all that ease, I sometimes forget that I really like baking bread.
One of the coolest things about America is how much freedom there is to choose to live the life you want to. One only has to look at our culinary selection to see how easy it is to synthesize elements of another culture into ours. Knowing this, I think I didn’t quite recognize that in spite of that fact, moving away from a country means that there are elements of that culture that you will inevitably lose. It’s strange to try to figure out how to mesh two cultures together, and even stranger still to realize that there are parts of a culture that you once took completely for granted, and now are going to have to work to keep.