Mash's Digests

The Truth About Stories

2012-05-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

OMG OMG OMG! Authors talking about writing and contemporary issues!

Thomas King, a man of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent once wrote a book called “The Truth About Stories”. King opens the book with a fairly common piece of lore. In this scene a storyteller is relating to an audience that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle. Someone in the audience asks “but what does the turtle stand on?” Well, as it turns out, another turtle. This goes on for a bit and then finally the audience member asks, “Well what does the last turtle stand on?” to which the storyteller replies “It’s turtles all the way down.” King then says, “The truth about stories is that’s all we are. It’s stories all the way down.”

If I had to identify a motivating force or philosophy in my life, this would be it. I truly believe that all any individual, all any culture, all the entire world is made up of is stories. Stories about what happened to us, stories about what we believe, stories of history, of creation, of destruction; it’s all stories. Some stories are true, and some are not, and all of them are twisted in the telling, but that’s okay, that’s how it’s supposed to be.

This, I think, is why I’ve always been so interested in literature. Stories tell you about people; about how they view the world, about how the world views them, about how they view themselves, and to be able to see into that, to get a glimpse into someone else’s world, is incredibly compelling.

This is basically why I spent four years of my life - and a good portion of my parent’s money - reading my way through college. I majored in Spanish and English literature and every chance I got I took a class that focused on the narratives of a particular group, because that, to me, is the best window onto the world.

Which is why, when I heard that as part of work we would be going to the Franschhoek literary festival, I was more than a little excited (doesn’t hurt that Franschhoek’s the town with all the gorgeous vinyards. And mountains.)

The program for the literary festival showed such sessions as “Freedom of Information?” featuring the cartoonist ‘Zapiro’ - famous for depicting president Jacob Zuma with a shower head resting on the back of his head. This after Zuma admitted that yes he had knowingly had sex with an HIV-positive girl without wearing a condom but it was okay because he took a shower after.

There were also sessions on foreign aid in Africa, the role of print journalism among emergent online media, gay and lesbian issues, muslim issues, and a lot of book readings. In other words, my version of heaven. Have I mentioned this is all in the middle of vinyards? At the foot of a range of mountains?

In and amongst all of these sessions was also one called “Writing Africa” in which Harry Garuba, director of the centre for African Studies at University of Cape Town, talked about the then and now of African writing with a panel of authors. I didn’t recognize any of the names, but my inner monologue still went “OMG OMG OMG!” at the prospect of the talk. Because that’s the kind of inner monologue two literature degrees from U.Va. will get you!

The talk turned out to be phenomenal. There was discussion of why the authors chose their subjects, what it’s like to be a “African author” and what are the issues facing authors today.

Most compelling for me was Sindiwe Magona, a woman who just wrote a book called “Beauty’s Gift” which is about a middle class South African who dies of complications of AIDS. In talking about why she wrote the story, Ms. Magona spoke about the day she learned that eventually no South African family would be unaffected by HIV. She was in New York at the time and, “I came home,” she explained, “and I looked at my family, and I thought ‘which one?’
She then gave a moving and impassioned talk about the global HIV epidemic, about how many people are affected by it, and about how ignored it is. The whole time she was talking about this, I was thinking about the similarities to America. Where even though HIV exists, and we are extremely educated about it, we like to think of it as elsewhere, other people, not a problem close to us. Not a problem that will ever be close to us. Because that’s one of the things stories do. They make you think.

In other interesting moments of the talk Ms. Magona suggested organizing a “Toi toi” of upscale bookshops which relegated “African Wrtiers” to a space on the back shelves (I, not knowing what a toi toi was, had to turn to the woman in back of me and ask. Turns out it is a protest where people gather and sing and dance and chant to express their displeasure).

The only man on the panel (whose name I didn’t catch) talked about not wanting to write about white oppression in his books because it occupied so much of his life and his thoughts that he didn’t want to give it any more space in his imagination. When asked what the political significance of that was he countered by asking why it had to have any political significance, why it wasn’t okay to just be comfortable being who you were and writing about it.

The youngest author on the panel brought up points about the struggles of being a contemporary African writer, about not writing in your mother tongue, about immigration and being from one place but living in another and the issues this brings to someone personally, and to their writing.

The entire talk, I was rapt with attention, and I found every comment more interesting than the last. I took a class on African writing this past term. It was good, it was interesting, I learned a lot. I would have traded the whole term for listening to another hour of these guys talking.

I spent a lot of time thinking about why this was so, and I think it has something to do with the fact that occasionally in literature in the quest for meaning and unpacking every little truth and twist and turn of a particular tale we sometimes overlook what’s really important about any good narrative.

It’s power. It’s beauty. It’s the way it hits you in the gut. It’s what it reflects, what it illuminates, what it adds to perspective and understanding. Most of all what it says to you. Most of all what it does for you.
Because at the bottom of all this intellectualism and analysis and competition to be the one who found the magic key of the deepest meaning no one else has ever figured out it’s just stories. It’s stories all the way down.

Cape Town!

2012-05-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Cape Town Tuesday night around nine o’clock. Arriving in Cape Town is pretty much like arriving in any other city by night. You circle over a panorama of gridded, gorgeous lights and then touch down. By eleven o’clock I had settled into my apartment, unpacked, and crashed into bed. By eight the next morning I was awake, showered, breakfasted and sitting in a car headed for Franschhoek, a town about an hour outside of the city.

Nita, Malusi & I having tea

To explain why, I’m going to have to backtrack just a bit. For my thesis, I am working with an organization called PRAESA, which is affiliated with the University of Cape Town. PRAESA is now launching a national literacy campaign called Na’libali (here is the story in isiXhosa). As part of the campaign a few workers were heading out to schools to do reading activities in conjunction with Franschhoek’s literary festival. Stuffed into the car with me was Nita, another University of Edinburgh student who's also doing her thesis here, as well as Malusi and Xolisa (the X sounds like a C, but with a click done with the tongue on the top and side of the mouth).

The first school we visited was an astounding private school. Think Hogworts, except done up in a country-club motif instead of castle. The reading activities were organized by the private school, and so all of the volunteers who would be participating met up at the school, where we got to eat some muffins, have a bit of tea and coffee and chat before heading off to the schools.
I should mention here that Franschhoek is a gorgeous. In the unbelievably stunning sense. Just absolutely incredible. It is vinyard after vinyard set along tree-lined avenues in a valley surrounded by mountains. The primary school we ended up at was right at the foot of the mountains. The view was absolutely gorgeous, and the children all looked so adorable dressed up in their little school uniforms. Immediately Malusi went over to a group of them and started singing and dancing with them. These were clearly songs all the kids knew, and pretty much everyone was fighting to get into the courtyard and be part of the circle.

Xolisa with the children

    The school itself was well-built, and had more than a bit of a resemblance to a prison, but then so do most schools in America. To me, the classrooms were incredible. There was at least one chair per pupil, there were desks, everyone had a backpack, and supplies, and a smart uniform on. There were books in the classroom, there were even educational posters up on the walls detailing months and letters. Compared to Malawi it was unbelievable. Of course there's still a problem of overpopulation (most schools run with a ratio of about 70 pupils per teacher) and a lack of resources (there were definitely not enough textbooks for each child).
    While at the schools Malusi and Xolisa performed for the children. I went with Xolisa to the classrooms, and watched her with the children. I love watching stories performed. The oral aspect of storytelling is rarely seen now (for obvious reasons, there’s really not a space for it in the structure of life today - one is not going to get dressed up and go to a theater to see a bunch of stories), but I’ve seen a few in Scotland, and now here, and even though I could only understand a handful of words (thank you Chitumbuka!) it was easy to see that Xolisa is very talented.
    She told two stories to the children. The first was a building story, i.e. a story where you start with one verse, and then re-tell the story, adding a new verse every time. In this story there was an old woman with a pig who wouldn’t jump over a fence, so she told a dog to bite it, and then told a stick to beat the dog (which really, shouldn’t she have just grabbed the stick? Expecting a stick to become anthropomorphic and hit a dog all in one go seems a bit much) and then fire to light the stick, and then water to put out the fire.
    While telling the story, she had the children begin repeating the verses with her, and performing motions. The children were completely engaged throughout the whole story. It was really incredible to watch.

Oh and look I'm in a vinyard

    Next, she read a story to the kids, and not only did they all sit still and pay attention, but they were fighting to see the pictures each time she showed them around. Considering that the last time I went to a storytelling event the audience was semi-reluctant to participate, seeing this level of participation was fantastic. Plus, I’m just going to re-iterate this, it is always a wonderful experience for me to watch a storyteller at work.
    After the school we all headed down to a vinyard, where two people working in partnership with PRAESA were staying. We ended up having lunch out on the courtyard. In the middle of the trees. At the foot of the mountain. Did I mention we had quiche? And bread with mediteranean spreads and some sort of pureed smoked fish? Yup.
    All in all, I think it was a pretty good introduction to Cape Town. The astounding beauty, the incredible wealth, the not-so-much-wealth, the tourist attractions, and most interesting of all, the people. Everyone I’ve met in Cape Town is so different. There are different ethnicities, different backgrounds, different heritages, different perspectives on the problems within the country and how they should be handled. The one common factor though, is that everyone, absolutely everyone, has been incredibly and unbelievably nice.

Malawi again

2012-05-14T05:23:00.002-07:00

A while ago I decided that on my way down to South Africa it would be cool to take a layover in Malawi for a few days. This was actually a bit more complicated than originally anticipated, but thanks to some nice work on mom’s part, was achieved. So it was that on May 3rd, after a nice little stop-off in Addis Ababa, I touched down again in Lilongwe, Malawi.

Pretty much the first thing that hit me about Malawi was the heat. I’ve gotten kind of used to the weather in Scotland. I’ve adjusted my own expectations so that a partly-cloudy day feels practically balmy, and I had completely forgotten that the sun can be anything other than a passive presence vaguely illuminating the world. (By the end of the first day I was desperately in need of sunblock. I ended up going to “Game” the Malawian Wal-Mart, and buying a 125ml bottle of SPF 30 for MK 1,800 ($15)... it was half off.)

The second difference I noticed about Malawi was not a difference in the country, but a difference in myself. I’ve never come to Lilongwe in a situation where the city didn’t have the advantage of a favorable comparison. Before, I was always there after being in the village, or being in Mzuzu. Therefore I associated the city with amazing amenities - hot showers! electricity! enormous stores! incredible food! This time, however, I was coming to Lilongwe from Edinburgh, and I was surprised at how small it seemed, at how critical I was of the roads - which were in terrible shape - and how much I noticed the smell of burning trash, was bothered by all the people calling out to me, and was unimpressed by the selection of food. (Although I did buy two packets of “Jumbies” my formerly favorite junk-food, and found them as yummy as ever.)

This continued throughout the entire trip, at odd points and in strange ways. For example “Nyama on Wheels” (literally “meat on wheels”) a cart that sells “hotdogs” (it’s in quotes for a reason) used to be one of my favorite food stops. But this time, after biting into my nyama I wasn’t overwhelmed by the absolute deliciousness, instead I actually found myself vaguely wondering what exactly was in the... whatever I was eating.

I had a similar reaction when I had my first piece of toast with spread and jam. I used to LOVE toast with spread and jam. I would toast three, four pieces of bread and top them with “Blue Band” (a vitamin A spread that is widely substituted for butter) and “Mixed Fruit Jam” a concoction whose color can most accurately be described as a neon fuchsia. As stated before, I used to LOVE this stuff. This time, though, I found both to be practically inedible.

Hitch-hiking provided a more extreme example. My second day in Malawi we hitched out to the beach. It’s funny how, when you remember things, you tend to remember the good parts. For example, what I remember about hitch-hiking is all the times I had really incredibly interesting conversations with the people I was driving with, or how comfortable the cars were, or how nice it was to have a seatbelt, or how enjoyable just sitting by the side of the road talking to volunteers could be. I forgot how frustrating it is to have kids chanting to you, or tons of empty cars just passing you right by while the sun beats down on you. I also had readjusted my standards of safety. So there would be cars clunking by that I was in no way going to ride in that I knew a year ago I would have found great.

Going through this process was actually remarkably similar to what I went through when I returned home to America, where every now and then I would discover these little things that I thought I liked, or that hadn’t previously bothered me that now just drove me crazy. It’s a strange feeling, and one that makes you feel like a stranger.

There was also, however, all the incredible stuff that I had missed. Chief among these was the community. About two minutes into one hitch we stopped to pick up some passengers and a woman getting in just passed all her luggage - including her baby - up to random people on the truck. Then we all started speaking, which gave me a chance to use my Chitumbuka again, and then to explain how I knew Chitumbuka, and realize that I really miss just being able to meet people, and talk to people like that. I was also blown away all over again by the scenery, I had somehow forgotten just how breathtaking Malawi is. On top of all of that, I got to re-visit a few Peace Corps volunteers I used to know, to hang out at a beach without worrying about being caught in a hail-storm, to eat with my fingers, and to not worry quite so much about time, and to go for a whole day without logging into the internet.

Oh, and I got to see a python, some baboons, monkeys, and a leopard. Then I petted a lion. She purred, and it sounded roughly like a speedboat starting. So it was, in other words, everything I would expect from a trip to Malawi: Uplifting, disappointing, comforting, discomfiting, hot, beautiful, frustrating and overwhelming.

I had two things I was expecting that didn’t come through though. The first was that I was really hoping that there would be pictures of the new president Joyce Banda. Instead I found her conspicuous in her absence, there were no shirts with her face on them, no “Joyce Banda” chitenje’s in the market, no giant billboards proclaiming how she was helping the country. In fact, the only sign of the recent transition was that all the flags were still at half-mast. This lack of a personality cult is probably a good thing, but it was sad for me, as I wanted to grab a piece of memorabilia or two.

The second, was that I was a bit surprised that going back to Malawi didn’t feel more like returning home, but then, when I thought about it afterward, why should it have? I was in Lilongwe and a nearby beach for a few days. None of those contain the elements that made Malawi my home - my village, my Malawian family, my students, my friends, or everyone I came to know and love. These are the elements that make Malawi home to me, not the simple geography of a few towns, and I can’t wait to go back for a bit longer, and visit them all again.

Leaving Edinburgh

2012-05-10T02:38:00.000-07:00

This past February students in my program were given the option, instead of writing a traditional thesis, to apply for a work-based project. I applied to program in Cape Town which is working on literacy promotion (especially mother-tongue literacy) among younger children. At the end of February I was accepted for the work-based project, along with another student from Edinburgh, Nita.

While I was extremely excited about the prospect of working in Cape Town, being accepted to the project meant a large number of additional responsibilities, all coinciding with my final essays. By far the largest of these responsibilities was finding a place to live. I’m not sure how many people reading this have ever had to look for housing before - but I have not. Ever.

In college, I didn’t have to look for housing, I had to check the little box that says “I would like to live in this dorm.” In Peace Corps I didn’t have to look for housing, I just got dropped off at my house. Heading to Edinburgh, it was back to checking the box. Going to South Africa, Nita and I were tasked with finding our own apartment.

Okay, everyone reading this who has ever had to find their own housing, try for just a second, to remember what that was like. Now imagine that you’re not in the same country as all your potential houses, and further imagine that the country where all your potential houses are doesn’t get internet regularly. The one saving grace, however, was that I had a Peace Corps friend in Cape Town who volunteered to tour any flats Nita and I ended up considering. Incredible.

Nita and I started off by agreeing that we didn’t mind if we spent a little extra money, it would be worth it to have a nice apartment. So we began by looking at fairly expensive townhouses or flats which had balconies and pools and gardens and gorgeous views of table mountain. Our first meeting to decide where to live we had 22 flats or houses marked off. We called all of them. None of them were available for short-term rental.

So then we started looking at flats that were maybe a bit further out of town, didn’t have views of table mountain, or pools, but had furniture and seemed pretty okay. Nada. So then we started looking at flat-shares, e-mailing students to see if they wanted short-term roommates. At some point in the whole process one of my current flat-mates suggested we set up a tent and stick an “Occupy Cape Town” sign on it. I considered it. Not for long, but I considered it.

Finally, after a few incredibly stress-filled weeks I got an e-mail from a woman who did nightly apartment rentals saying that one of her apartments might be available for long-term rent, she’d let me know. As it turned out, the apartment was not available, but the exchange gave me an idea. In Cape Town, and I think in many other places as well, there is a new trend of staying in an apartment instead of a hotel. These apartments are furnished, available on a nightly basis, and have similar prices to hotels. Which is why Nita and I hadn’t looked into them. After all, $60 per night gets pretty expensive for two months. The woman’s e-mail though, had been a revelation.

That night, I e-mailed every short term ad I could find and asked them if they could give us an apartment for two months, listing the price I’d be willing to pay for rent. I had five responses by the next day. But the end of the week, I had signed my first lease ever.

Apartment in hand I finished my essays and found myself faced with the prospect of leaving Edinburgh for two months. I had this grand plan that I was going to take a week to be a tourist in Edinburgh before I left. I even checked out a tour-book from the library and downloaded ten podcasts from the Edinburgh tourism website.

Then, life took over. The days were overcast, cold, and rainy. I had invitations to go hang out with friends, books that needed reading, e-mails that needed responding and last minute chores to do.

Everyone talks about how if you live in a really touristy area you never do all the touristy things that are in your backyard. I have found this to be true, but it’s not always because you take them for granted. A lot of times it’s because when you are living somewhere you are doing just that - living - and it’s hard to take time away to vacation. That said, I’ve spent two phases of life living in highly toured areas, and I’ve absolutely loved living in them both, and I have definitely taken advantage of them, just maybe not in the same way a tourist would. So, faced with the prospect of leaving Edinburgh for two months I was incredibly excited about heading to Cape Town, but desolate about leaving Scotland.

Okay, there may not be that much sun, and the city is a bit monochrome in shade, but it’s also amazing The people are so nice, there are wonderful events on every day, there’s free celtic music all the time, the city is saturated with a history that’s practically unbelievable and there isn’t a day that I don’t look up at some building that I’ve passed a thousand times before and notice something new - like a plaque declaring that Robert Burns used to live there, or a gargoyle staring down at me from the roof.

So as I took an unbelievably scenic train down to London, watching coastline and villages, pastures and sheep fly by me I indulged in a bit of pining for what I was leaving behind. Granted I will be back, but only for a month, and really I feel like I could spend years in Edinburgh and never be bored.

Croissant Making

2012-04-21T04:33:00.000-07:00

So, I realized that in this blog I don’t really tend to talk about the actual reason I’m here... school. This is because of castles. And food. And celtic music. And Celiedh’s. And

travel. And while I do study interesting topics, and really enjoy what I’m learning, by and large Edinburgh, and
Scotland, and everything I do external to classes, pretty much eclipses what I’m studying and I’m okay with this.

It does, however, have the unfortunate side-effect that I don’t talk about the people in my program. Which is a shame, because they are all really really awesome. There are fourteen people in my program, which means we’re a pretty tight-knit group. Unfortunately, only seven of them are going to figure in this particular anecdote. They are: Mara, Tara, Tara, Alex, Alex, Katie, and Kate (None of that was a typo, and I’m not making any of these names up).

As stated previously, they are all awesome, and at some point, when we were in the middle of our essays, I conceived of the idea of having a croissant-baking evening. Now, it’s worth mentioning here that one of the Alexes is allergic to: nuts, dairy (of the cow variety), spices (like, any), onions, carrot, orange, melon, celery and maize. She is also a vegetarian. As most people reading this blog will know, I like to get creative with food. I don’t have anything that compares to that.

It’s also relevant to point out here that her peanut allergy happens to be of that deadly “my throat closes up if there’s a peanut hiding somewhere a block away” type (okay, a bit of hyperbole, but it’s to emphasize the severity).

This has led to interesting situations where photographs of an evening out will include a group shot of everyone all dressed up, a group shot of everyone out at dinner/dancing/whatever, a group shot of everyone a bit later chilling at the bar and finally, a group shot of everyone in the emergency room waiting room wondering when someone will finally give Alex some medicine. So, for croissant day we had two challenges, 1) actually make croissants, and 2) make Alex-friendly croissants.

Prior to croissant-making day people kept asking me, “So, how do you make croissants, anyway?” To which I would reply, “Butter.” This is more or less accurate. However, when one is allergic to dairy, butter is not a possibility. Hence, I found myself in the faux butter aisle looking for a spread that didn’t contain milk.

Finding a dairy-free spread is actually surprisingly difficult. Out of roughly thirty butter/butter spread products, I found one that didn’t contain dairy of any kind. And it had asparagus on the front. Interesting when contrasted with all the butter containers that showed happy families eating “buttered” pieces of toast, but I’m sure there’s an advertising rationale in there somewhere. I’m just not sure what it is.

When I said that how you make croissants is “butter”, this isn’t strictly true. How you actually make croissants is 1) butter and 2) refrigerate the dough. Pretty much every step of croissant making is some variation on “roll out dough, slather it with butter, now chill it in the refrigerator for a few hours.” When one is trying to have a make croissants class in one night, however, chilling the dough constantly turns out to be fairly difficult verging on nigh-on impossible. So, I made the executive decision that those steps would be skipped.

I first rationalized it out thusly: how important can chilling the dough be? I’m sure you don’t really need to chill the dough. Then I thought you know, if you really didn’t need to chill the dough, they probably wouldn’t do it. I finally arrived at well, we don’t really have time for that, and how bad can dough spread with a ton of butter be, anyway? Which I thought was a nice conclusion, so I stuck with.

We ended up making two batches of dough; regular, and Alex-friendly. Regular had milk, Alex-friendly used soy milk. For both sets of dough we mixed two packets instant yeast with two cups flour, 3 tbs sugar, 1/2 tsp salt, and 2 cups of milk (or soy milk). After making this initial mixture we added in enough flour to create a nice elastic ball, and then turn it out onto a floured surface to kneed. We found that in the Alex-friendly batch the dough was much more watery, and thus required a lot more flour for that second step.

Once we had a really good consistency of dough for each batch we rolled them out into rectangles. We then placed a thin (like maybe 1/4 inch) layer of butter in a rectangle over the center of the dough, leaving about a two inch perimeter all around.

There’s some foods that you just really don’t want to think about how they are made. The butter step is when you realize croissants are in that

category. When you see them in the bakery they look nice and brown and crispy. When you bite into them they taste incredible. When you spread a layer of butter over them, all you can think about is your arteries clogging. We found that for the spread, though, because of the consistency or chemical make-up or something, you can and REALLY should use less. Like maybe just a covering layer.

Once a liberal chunk of butter (or spread) has been applied, you fold the non-buttered parts of the dough over the buttered part (the edges of the dough should meet so that the buttered section is completely covered) and you roll it out into a rectangle again. If you have put too much spread on it’s going to come squirting out right here, which is a bit hilarious.

At this point you are supposed to chill the dough for another hour or two. We didn’t. Instead, we folded the dough into a book fold, which meant folding the right third of the dough over the center and then folding the left third over all of that so that it looks like a thick book. Then you roll it out (if you really put too much spread on, it will still be squirting out, and if you are easily amused, it will remain hilarious). At this point you are supposed to chill the dough again. We didn’t.

You then fold the dough into a letter fold, which is like a book fold, except up-down instead of horizontal, and you roll it out again. There will still be spread squirting out at this point. Really, you don’t want to put on too much spread. You can always put on more between rollings.

Then, you cut the dough into small squares, split those squares into triangles, and roll them, broad base first into a croissant, and bend the roll into a half-moon shape. (Note, even people who are perfectly happy to enter into extremely heated and impassioned debates about the convoluted committee system of the United Nations and how it could be improved, can become very sensitive about the shape of their croissant. Best not to test it).

Then, we covered the surface in an egg-white wash (egg being one of the things Alex is not allergic to) and baked the croissants for around 20 min at 220 c (400 f) - although the Alex-friendly ones need to bake for a considerably longer time for some reason.

What emerged was essentially very buttery croissant-shaped bread. Which was fine. And delicious. Especially when eaten with jam and toppings. Oddly enough, the dairy free croissants didn’t really taste any different from the regular ones. True, neither pastry was what could reasonably be defined as “croissants”, per say, but maybe, some day when I have a ton of free time, I’ll try it actually using the refrigeration. In the meantime, eating buttered bread with home-made jam and some good friends is pretty much all you can ask for in a day.

The Changing of the Guard

2012-04-12T10:26:00.002-07:00

    As some of you may already know by now, this past Thursday, (5 April) Bingu wa Mutharika, the president of Malawi as of 2004 (and thus the entire time I was living there) passed away from a heart attack.
    My feelings on finding out about this were, and still are, mixed. Towards the end of his career, the man was not faithful to his country, or to his position. He owed the people far better than what he gave, and his death provides hope that the situation in the country - which has deteriorated significantly since his re-election in 2009 - will now improve. Yet, I also can’t help remembering the president from that first term, everything he did for his country, and all the hope he instilled.
    The image from his second term is far the more publicized right now, and the media is littered with references to his blunders. He had lecturers from Chancellor University fired for being critical of the government. He alienated donors after he kicked the British high commissioner out upon learning the man had said he was ‘autocratic, combative and intolerant of criticism’ (sure showed him!). In probably the most well-known instance of abuse of power, his crackdowns on protests led to the killings of 19 people.
    There were other, just as crucial events, however, that didn’t make it into the news. He began his second term by failing to pay civil servants’ salaries for several months. He consistently ignored the fact that demand for Burley tobacco, Malawi’s main cash crop, was falling. By the time of his death, fuel was in drastically short supply due to a lack of foreign exchange, prices of basic foodstuffs had soared due to inflation, and sugar - which is produced in Malawi - could barely be found.
    Not a great situation on any front. This is in heavy contrast to what things were like when I first came to the country. At that time, in 2008, the man was at the end of his second term and he was a good leader. His fertilizer subsidy had taken the nation from famine to food surplus. He had initiatives encouraging people to pay taxes, and he had innovative plans for the country’s development. I met him. I thought he was well spoken, and nice.
    He was re-elected freely and fairly in 2009 (as nearly I or anyone else can tell.) People were happy, and people were proud. Rightfully so. There was this sense of everyone having played a part in the process. I compare memories of election day in Malawi, with people dancing and showing off their ink-covered thumbs (proof that they had voted) to sentiments expressed now by my American friends concerning the upcoming elections. “I just, I don’t even want to vote,” one of them told me. “I look around at the people running, and the state of things, and I don’t even want any part of it. I know that’s a horrible thing to say, and I’ll vote anyway, but that’s just how I feel.”
    Contrasted against this is the enthusiasm and the hope that was engendered when Bingu was re-elected. And then came all the disasters of his second term.
    What is most tragic about this story is what could have been. Had he listened to the people, had he been responsive to criticism, instead of defensive, had he made it clear he was stepping down after two terms and opening elections up to the democratic process - as the constitution mandates - he would have strengthened his country immeasurably, and died a hero.
    Instead, he dies as almost a split man. The one who came from the wings and was the leader people deserved, and the one who then let them down.
    His death, too, was not entirely free of controversy. As near as can be understood, he actually passed away Thursday morning of a heart-attack, although the news was not confirmed until Saturday.
    The reasons for this have to do with issues of succession. According to the Malawi constitution, Joyce Banda, the vice president, was clearly supposed to take over the office. However, Joyce Banda had been kicked-out of Bingu’s political party, the Democratic People’s Party, earlier, though she had not been ousted from the position of vice president, since she was, in fact, popularly elected.
    It was pretty clear that while the constitution stated that Mrs. Banda should be president, Bingu would not have chosen her as his successor. His choice - who was/is being groomed for the 2014 elections - would have been his brother, Peter Mutharika. Hence the delay in announcing his death.
    If you check to see who the new president of Malawi is, though, you will find an example of the strength of the country, its people, and the system in place. Joyce Banda is in power - supported first and foremost by the people, but helpfully also by the police, the military, and an ever-growing number of defecting-from-their-own-parties-as-fast-as-they-can MPs.
    So far (you know, in the first three days of being President) she’s given me every reason to be optimistic about the future of the country. She’s declared a ten-day mourning period for Bingu, which I think is right. She’s sacked a bunch of ministers who were opposed to her - but who also happen to have shaky credentials, and who occasionally were involved in corruption or brutality scandals. In their place she has installed ministers who - at least at first glance - seem competent and reliable. She has ordered investigations into the death of a student protest leader at Chancellor that for a while now has been deemed a suicide (a label that doesn’t agree with the autopsy report) and she has re-established relationships with Britain, the U.S. and Mozambique.
    Oh, and she’s a woman. Which, if you’re counting, makes 67 countries that have now had a female head of state/government before America. Whoo!
    I’m hopeful. I don’t know what Joyce Banda will be like as a leader, but her resume, and what she’s done so far, are promising. On Sunday, April 8 she promised to “well and truly perform the functions of the high office of the president of the Republic of Malawi”. Hopefully, she fulfills this promise - Malawi deserves a leader worthy of its people. Joyce Banda - Woyee!

Out and About

2012-04-01T13:28:00.000-07:00

Looking down into the courtyard

    A while ago, a friend came to Edinburgh and visited me. On the first day here they quite naturally said, “So, what is there to see in this town?” To which I replied,
    “Well, there’s the library, then there’s my dorm room, and then there’s the building where I have classes.”
    This just goes to show that no matter where you are, University can be quite insular. Take right now for instance. It’s been around 60 degrees here for the past week. Sixty. The sun has been up from seven in the morning to seven p.m. There have been barbecues going on all over the place. I have watched them from inside the library.
    This is because within the next few weeks I have three essays (each worth 100% of my grade) due. At times like this - times when I go from the dorm room to the library, library to the dorm room - there is only one appropriate response. Take a day off and get out of town before you go crazy.
    At U.Va., this meant going to the Blue Ridge mountains and hiking a short trail. In Edinburgh, it means visiting a castle.

So, a little while ago, I hopped on a train and set out for Linlithgow Palace. Because I’ve never lived in a country blessed with castles before, I’ve never had the opportunity to explore them the way I do here. Prior to moving to Scotland my castling experience consisted of touring gigantic palaces either with a guide, a booklet, or an audioguide. And, for some of the castles here, that is still what I’ve done (for Stirling castle, especially, I would HIGHLY recommend it. You do not want to miss out on a bit of the history). However, for most of the castles - the smaller semi-ruined ones - you just go and explore.
    Although it wouldn’t seem like it from the outside, it’s incredibly easy to get lost in these castles - and in fact, that’s part of the point. You walk straight for a bit, and then maybe turn to the right, and then see a curving stairwell that strikes your fancy and next thing you know you’re in the dungeon.
    One of the greatest aspects of this exploration is that it allows your mind to wander. As your booted feet slap over the stones from room to room you also travel back in time, and who you are changes minute to minute. Looking up at the swooping rafters of the ceiling of the great hall, you are clearly some Lord or Lady, presiding over what would naturally be a sumptuous feast and an incredible party. In the bedroom, you are still that same noble, but now colder, and bored, and without the giant fireplace in the hall, and with the fog settling over the loch outside as you stare out the window, you realize how long the winters must have been.
    Traveling downward through the castle you find your place in society also lowers, until, on reaching into the large storage rooms that span the entire length of the castle, you have become a servant or a simple worker, making the bread, or perhaps trading in wine and food. And you wonder, what would it have been like to work in these cellars, would you have been happy?
    Next door to the storage spaces are almost always the prisons, with tiny windows letting in just a bit of light. For some reason, the imagination almost never wanders to what it would have been like to occupy those rooms, even though frequently they ended up being inhabited by those who once entertained in the great rooms, or slept in the beds, upstairs.
    Of course, part of these mental meanderings are, I realize, due to what I read. I think this hit me full force when, exploring the ancient privy room with a friend, she stared down the toilet and remarked, almost off hand “Huh, so you actually could have escaped by crawling out one of these.”
    Of course, with all these mental and physical wanderings, one does tend to get rather separated from one’s friends. A few weeks ago, a group of five of us went to a castle. After wandering around for roughly a half an hour, I finally encountered a friend. “There you are,” I said. “Have you seen anyone else?”
    “I have seen everyone else within the last ten minutes,” She replied. “All heading in different directions at different velocities."

About ten minutes after that, all of us - save the friend we had initially passed - ended up on the top-most turret, looking down over the castle, it’s adjacent church, and the loch. No matter where you have been or who you have become in the exploration of the castle, on top of the turrets you are always a child, the kind who has conquered some new great adventure and wishes to scream “See me on top of this castle? I have conquered all!” Or, if you happen to be like one of my friends, you print out your own flag, take a picture of yourself holding it, and claim the castle for all to see.
    As stated before though, there is that thing about castles and the twisting and turning confusingness. About five minutes after four of the group members were standing around on top of a turret, the face of a fifth member appeared in the window of the turret kiddy-corner to us, and several floors down.
    “How do I get up there?” She asked.
    “You have to go right and get to that tower over there!” We pointed. A minute later her face appeared in the tower next to us, one floor up.
    “Where now?”
    “Up two floors and across the gangway.” Two minutes later a head stuck out from between some bars directly underneath us. “Okay, now what?”
    “Go outside and climb up.”
    By the way, if none of you have ever had to walk on the outside of a castle wall to reach a staircase so you can get to the highest turret - it’s pretty darn scary, but finally, we were all united at the summit.

After scaling the castle, we walked over to see the church. Many of the castles (and Linlithgow is no exception) are attached to churches. The incredible thing about these churches (besides their breathtaking architectural beauty) is how unbelievably old they are. In this particular church, there were embroidered wall hangings from the 1200’s. For me, it is incredibly hard to even conceptualize that. I kept staring at the wall hanging thinking, ‘The person who did this lived eight hundred years ago. Eight hundred. That’s two hundred years before Columbus screwed up and stumbled upon my country.’
While all of this is cool, and probably beneficial in a lot of ways - good to exercise, good to use your imagination, good to hang out with friends, good to take in a bit of the countryside and some history - what I like best about it is that it’s just an opportunity to get out.
In school, you run into this danger of separating school from “the real world”. Of becoming so wrapped up in this life at University that you forget about things outside. This isn’t good. So, as nice as it would be to get those few extra grade points more on the essay, sometimes it’s nice to take a deep breath, set down the pen, and get out, even if only for a bit.

Book Addiction

2012-03-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Margaret and I have a problem. I’m addicted to books.

I guess it all started with my parents. My mother is a librarian, you know. Even before I entered school she and my dad would read to me every night, have me listen to books on tape.

Then, as I grew older, she began to hand me books to read, giving me another as soon as I finished with one, always handing me more, more, more. Around that same time I began attending the American Library Association meetings. There, I saw thousands of books being advertised, glorified, authors and publishers out on display. I think it was there that the problems really began. By the time I reached high school, you would rarely see me without a book in hand.

Holds a copy of every book written in the U.K.

In college, instead of majoring in something sensible like engineering or accounting I found myself slipping further into the mire. I majored in not only English Literature, but Spanish Literature as well. It seemed my fate was sealed.

Yet, in one last ditch effort, I tried to extricate myself when I graduated from college, enrolling in the Peace Corps, and heading off to a remote village in Africa. I thought that perhaps there, surrounded by a strong community and a new way of life I could reduce my reading down to normal levels.

Central Lending Library

Alas, I was wrong. My new village encouraged me in my reading, and instead of giving up my habit I actually became a book supplier, passing around novels and works of history to the numerous members of the community who asked for them. As if this weren’t bad enough, I was assigned to teach English at the local high school, and so began to pass on my addiction on a far larger scale then I could have ever imagined.

Having given in to the lifestyle completely, on finishing my Peace Corps service I traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland - the first ever UNESCO city of Literature. I thought that at least here, I could be surrounded by others like me.

How right I was. At some point during my school career I met some people - I’m going to refrain from naming any names. Like me, they had long ago become addicted to books. Like me, they would spend entire afternoons reading, could quote their favorite passages at great length, and were in love with fictional characters. For a while, this was as far as it went. We talked about books, we hung out, and occasionally we made recommendations as to what we should be reading. Then, after we had been friends for a long time, one person introduced me to second hand bookstores.

the used bookstores

Among bars and strip clubs lie...

I had thought, before then, that I had hit rock bottom. I had thought before then I was in so deep I could never come up. I hadn’t known what deep was. In one fell swoop I entered a world I had never known existed - Heyer for 2.50, Austin for 3 pounds, then entire (hardcover!) poems ballads and songs of Rabbie (Burns that is) for only 4.50. Rows upon rows upon rows of beautiful, old, gorgeously bound books, crammed straight up to the ceiling. With books so cheap we had no qualms about buying them, even on our limited incomes. Yet, we did not anticipate how so many small purchases could add together. With no steady form of income, our debts began to mount.

We invented fantastical justifications for further purchases, participating in one-off psychological studies at the University - which paid enough to procure one or two volumes. We would invent pipe dreams about winning the lottery, marrying rich, or even getting paid for writing a book ourselves. In those dreams we would own entire bookstores, and have houses whose walls were lined with books.

Yet, underneath the facetious talk was a sadness, a realization that we would probably always be doing whatever it takes to get just one more Stevenson or a 3rd edition illustrated book of fairy tales by Andrew Lang. We are the ones who calculate how much it will cost to get the really cute blue-leather-bound Bernard-Shaw before we calculate how much we need to eat, and for us it is too late.

For others, however, it is not. So I write this as a warning. Watch your friends and family carefully, a little reading is healthy, but it can go downhill fast. If you see someone with their head always in a book, do not remove it forcibly, but maybe suggest something else they would enjoy doing. Perhaps a nice T.V. program. Repeated administrations of such doses should decrease the reading to a normal level. If you are not sure if someone’s reading has reached a critical point, ask yourself these simple questions:

1) Can the person function without reading at least once a day?

2) Does the person read everywhere, even in settings where it might not be appropriate?

3) Does the person hide books around the house?

4) Does the person become oblivious when reading?

5) Are pages of their books stained with the remnants of food?

6) Does the person make frequent literary references that only they understand?

7) Do they own more than one library card?

8) Have they ever set up a tent outside a bookstore?

9) Do they know the exact dimensions of the library from “Beauty and the Beast”?

10) Have you ever found them in the bushes outside an author’s house, and when questioned, they pretended to be looking for gum.

It’s too late for me, but not for others. Do your part: don’t read to your kids. Practice saying “Library, what library?” If at all possible avoid plays, and try to stay away from movie adaptations of literary works. If we are all very careful, hopefully, we will one day live in a world where we can say no one is reading-obsessed.

Lions & Tigers & BABY ELEPHANTS! - Kenya III

2012-03-04T13:38:00.001-08:00

Baby Elephant! CUTE!

    There’s this interesting element to baby mammals. They are adorable. Even when their parents are decidedly not. Take baboons for example. Interesting animals, but not necessarily what I would refer to as cute. Baby baboons? Adorable. This rule seems to me universal. I have applied it to every animal I can think of, and it has all come out the same.
    Goats? Annoying. Baby goats? Adorable. Pigs? Kinda ugly. Baby pigs? Adorable. Leopards? Graceful, but intimidating. Baby Leopards? Oh so adorable! This is true whether the mammal is hairy or kind of pink and wrinkly, big or small. Nothing embodies this principle more than elephants.
    Elephant babies are not, all things considered, small. Neither are they furry or particularly agile. They don’t really give off the impression of being tiny and helpless and needing to be coddled. They are, nevertheless, adorable.

Excuse me, but I believe you have my bottle.

In my last few days in Kenya I got to see this first hand when mom and I visited an elephant orphanage.
In the elephant orphanage, orphaned elephants are all housed together and cared for before they are reintroduced to the wild in Tsavo National Park. Because the elephants are reintroduced in stages, they tend to have a fairly high success rate reintegrating - 90%, in fact.
Mom and I got to watch an hour-long presentation on the various baby elephants. During the presentations, the young babies were brought out, fed from their bottles, and then left to play while their handlers talked about where each elephant was found, and why they were now at the orphanage. Especially cute was a two month old baby, who had to be accompanied by a handler at all times, had sunblock on the outer edges of his ears, and was occasionally shaded from the sun by an umbrella carried by another handler.

I would like my bottle please

There were also various toys and watering holes around the grounds, which the elephants would splash and roll about in, and some of the older elephants were actually playing “football” (soccer for all the Americans) with their trainers. I guess the balls are supposed to help them use their trunks, but the funny thing was they were mimicking their trainers and kicking the ball with their feet.
    One of the elephants, in playing around with the ball, actually punctured it on her tusk. The ball stayed, deflated, on her tusk and she kept looking around as if to say “Where’s my ball gone? What did you do with my ball?” Finally, the trainers took the ball off her tusk and replaced it with another, more plastic and less inflatable, one.
    Seeing the elephants was amazing, and I actually got to pet the baby as he walked by, which turned out to be not as cool as I had thought, since the baby was actually very dirty, and oily, and I wasn’t entirely sure where I could wipe my hand off. But still, now I can say I got to pet a baby elephant!
    Post elephants, we went to feed some giraffes. You know, typical day, see the elephants, feed the giraffes. The giraffes are kept in a large enclosure, and there is a small, elevated gazebo where visitors can buy pellets and feed the giraffes. This is really cool on the one hand, because you’re getting to feed a giraffe.

Seriously now, the bottle

On the other hand there’s a hugely long tongue that’s practically prehensile and a bunch of giraffe slobber. But it’s still pretty amazing. You are up close and interacting with a giraffe, and you get to take really funny pictures. (As I was watching, some people actually held pellets in their mouth so they could get a picture of the giraffe ‘kissing’ them. Ick.)
The next day we went off to Karen Blixen’s house. Karen Blixen is the lady who started a coffee farm, and later, after it had folded, wrote “Out of Africa”. Her house is gorgeous, and the tour really well done and interesting. One does wonder about the lion skins that serve as rugs in her bedroom. Personally, I would be inclined to trip over a head at night, or stub my toe on an errant tooth, but hey, if “dead predator” is the look you’re going for, lion skin certainly achieves it.

BOTTLE!!!

Post Blixen house (after quite a bit of time spent trolling the gardens for... you guessed it, birds!) we went to the Maasai market, on the top floor parking lot of one of the shopping malls.
Now, I lived in Africa for three years. I have quite a bit of experience bargaining. However, in Malawi, bargaining is easy. I knew the price, I spoke the language, if anyone tried to rip me off, I walked away. In Nairobi, not so clear-cut. Largely because I had no idea what various prices should be. But, I started trying to estimate from initial quoted prices and trying to get a feel for what things should cost, and I think I got pretty good at it. But then there were these problems. The problem was when we would buy things for mom.

Ummm... Problem

When I was buying things, mom would very politely wander off somewhere else and leave me to it, because she’s a nice caring mommy like that. But when she was buying things, she, for some reason, felt that she needed to be present. While mom is actually pretty good at bargaining, she has this weird quirk where when you start fighting over amounts around say... a quarter, she just stops caring. Whereas dad and I will fight to the cent. Or half cent. Or tuppence even. This is because we understand that bargaining isn’t about money, it’s about pride. Mom, on the other hand, thinks it’s about going in and getting what you want for a price you’re willing to pay. Whatcha gonna do?
The next day I woke up at 2am to catch my
4am flight back to cold and filled with only five hours of sunlight Edinburgh. Mom and Dad went to the beach. I consoled myself by remembering I live next door to a castle, but really, Edinburgh could do with a few more baby elephants wandering the street. Just saying.

Oh hey look I'm feeding it

Oh hey look it's a giraffe.

New Country New Birds! - Kenya II

2012-02-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

Recipe: Pizzadilla (for when you are too tired to make a pizza, but really really want one)
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Ingredients
Flour
Salt
2 tbsp Oil

Onion
Tomato
Basil
Oregano
Mozzarella

Instructions
Make tortillas. To do this, you will add a certain amount of flour to a bowl. Just pick an amount, but be reasonable. Add in salt, then oil. Then, put in enough water so that the flour will mix together into a nice sticky ball. Then add more flour until it's pliable. Roll pieces of it out into tortillas. Leave them aside. But not on top of each other unless they are well dusted with flour.
Okay, now for the filling. You want grated mozzarella cheese, and you probably want the cheap kind. You can fry up the onions and tomatoes with oregano, garlic and salt to make a nice sauce OR you can just be lazy and not. It still tastes good. But make sure oregano, tomatoes and basil are all mixed. Not mozzarella. Mozzarella is separate. Fry the tortilla on one side. Flip over. Put mozzarella cheese and tomato fixings on the fried side, and then fold tortilla over. It should be like a quesedilla and stick together. For this it is really important you use a lot of cheese, and not as much tomatoes. As is probably obvious by the previous statement this is a sometimes recipe. Like when you are stressed and need a lazy treat. I would not necessarily call it the most healthy recipe per say.
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I really like birds. One might even, were one so inclined, say that it borders a bit on the obsessive. I began liking birds in Zambia, on a safari, when, given a bird book and the task of identifying birds, I suddenly became enthralled with the concept of seeing all the birds! Reading about all their habits! Looking at the migration patterns, mating dances, where they live, what they do! It wasn’t a process. I can’t explain to you how it happened. Practically out of nowhere, birds became fascinating to me.
As a spectator, this type of behavior can be rather hard to put up with. There exist group shots where everyone is sitting around a table, calmly eating their lunch and I am leaned over, sweatshirt practically falling in my soup, looking through a pair of binoculars. This isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that I can still look at that picture and tell you exactly which bird I was looking at. It was a Redshank. And I have no regrets. (All below are photo cred Melissa the magnificent)

Birdwatching

Still birdwatching

Okay, this one's staged. But still very accurate.

Stiiiill at it.

     My parents have been extremely tolerant of this new trait suddenly appearing in their daughter. Mom actually went out on a bird walk with me with a birding club in Maine, and as we drove through the streets of Kenya dad pointed out various birds to me, explaining that storks usually hung out at one of the trees in the upcoming intersection, and that kites flew around really close to the porch of the apartment.
    The thing about a new country is... it offers all new birds! So as we drove through downtown Nairobi some of the birds (Lilac-breasted Rollers mostly, perched on the wires) I recognized from Malawi. But most of the birds I did not. It was with great disappointment that I realized I could not order the car to pull over to stop in the middle of the highway so that I could identify what that pretty blue shiny bird was (Greater Blue-eared Starling... but we’ll get to that later).

Nice picture of a kite taken by Dad.

A little way outside of Nairobi we were in Kileleshwa, the neighborhood mom and dad now live in. The apartment itself is really spacious, but the coolest part is the two balconies (one off mom and dad’s room, one off the living room), which look out over a house surrounded by a grove of trees. Kites circle around the outside of the apartment, and if you stand still for a while in the evening they get close enough that you can see their individual feathers adjusting during flight. There are also a few European Cinnamon-chested Bee-eaters, which was pretty cool, as prior to that point I had only ever seen Bohm’s (Bee-eaters, that is).

Bohm's bee-eater from Malawi

    Bee-eaters are some of the more fascinating birds out there because they eat bees. Speaking as someone who has a hard time not running away screaming from bees, it’s hard not to be impressed by an animal that catches bees in its beak, stuns the insects by slamming their heads against a rock, and then rubs the bees thorax against a rock until the stinger comes out and, voíla, former threat becomes tasty snack. Or, as dad puts it, “How, evolutionarily speaking, do you think that ever got started?”
    I spent most of my first day in Kenya sleeping. My second day we ran errands at the local shopping mall (that’s right, shopping mall, there was even an escalator.) Chief among these errands was picking up a new bird book for me. In Malawi, my bird-bible was Newman’s Bird’s of Southern Africa which is awesome, because it has a checklist in the back where I can keep track of all the birds I’ve seen. However, Newman’s only extends to just below Malawi, so for Kenya I picked up the Helm Field Guide Birds of East Africa. It’s awesome.
    After getting my book (and doing a bunch of other stuff which I don’t really remember) we went out to lunch at a gorgeous old hotel. With a lovely yard. Which included a lovely fountain. And many lovely trees. At which there were a ton of birds. And mom let me bring my new book to lunch. Big mistake. I spent most of lunch under a tree, head craned upward, trying to identify various Sunbirds (Variable, Collared). I did take enough of a break to eat a quesedilla with guacamole, and to notice that the Tex-Mex food in Kenya trounces its cousin cuisine in Scotland. In fact, most of the food in Kenya trounces most places I’ve been.
    My second day, dad had the idea that we should all go to Nakuru National Park, a renowned bird

Yellow-billed stork at Nakuru

sanctuary. I’m going to repeat that. DAD had the idea to go to Nakuru National Park. A renowned bird sanctuary. Now, granted, a big part of this was that he wanted me to see the drop-off of the rift valley, and to get out of Nairobi, but what do you think is going to happen if you take me to a National Park with a ton of birds in it?
What’s going to happen is I’m going to make you stop the car every five minutes so that we can identify birds. But first... the rift valley. The rift valley is an incredible geological formation. It stretches all the way from Syria to Mozambique and that alone is amazing. But to stand on its edge, to see the earth just literally drop away from you - that is completely breathtaking.

Great Rift Valley

In Malawi, the awe tends to be overshadowed by the fact that you are going down a single-lane two-way road with hairpin turns and are more concerned with wondering if you’ve told everyone you should that you love them, rather than looking out over the valley. There’s also a giant lake in the middle of it, which, while gorgeous, means you don’t get the full ‘valley’ effect. In Kenya, you get the full valley effect. You look out over this immense drop-off over miles and mile of flat expanse. And the road doesn’t make you feel like you are near-death, bonus!
We arrived at Nakuru, and it was clear from the get-go the place would be great for birds. I was able to identify the Blue-eared Starling in the parking lot, and tantalizingly to see lake Nakuru, on which many bird-shaped blurs were resting. There was also quite a cadre of baboons, one of whom mom walked in on in the bathroom after the clearly absent-minded baboon forgot to lock the door. The baboon (after playing around mom’s legs for a bit) seemed quite happy to let mom have the stall, but strangely enough she decided to wait until lunch.

Birds on a branch where we ate lunch

Speke's Weaver looking for some food

Lunch was amazing. We ate at a beautiful restaurant that looked out over lake Nakuru. They also happened to pour food scraps out for birds to come eat. We saw Speke’s Weavers, Speckled Mousebirds, Red-Eyed Doves, Laughing Doves, and a very persistent warthog.
After lunch we drove around the park and spotted a Superb Starling, a White-eyed Slaty Flycatcher, an African Wood-Hoopoe (majorly cool!) and a Fork-tailed Drongo. And those are only the birds I could positively identify. People (read: mom and dad) started getting tired of me crying out “oh, wait, there’s another one! Stop stop stop! (but really, see previous point about whose idea it was to go to a bird sanctuary!) It was also difficult to see birds on the right-hand side of the car as they were sharply silhouetted against the sun and so pretty much either looked like “small grey blob” or “medium grey blob” or “large raptor-like grey blob”.

View of Lake Nakuru from above

There’s also the fact that some birds are incredibly hard to identify. Some, you learn to identify on sight. Others are easy enough to look up. But the differences between some species is just plain crazy and unbelievably frustrating. Take our friend the Great Blue-eared Starling. This bird has two look-alikes, the Bronze-tailed Starling and the Sharp-tailed Starling. The Bronze-tailed Starling is different because it has purple central feathers on the upper side of the tail. Yup. While the Sharp-tailed Starling has a tail that is slightly longer and graduated. Different species. Really.
When I find them similar birds, I’m always confused as to how to mark it down in my bird journal. If I know it's either an African Hopoe or a Eurasian Hopoe can I mark a half for each? Very frustrating.

Napping rhinos, white or black? Who knows.

Rock Hyraxes! Closely related to elephants

On the non-avian side of things we spotted zebras, rock hyraxs, impalas, african buffalos (these are huge), and rhinos. The rhinos were my very first rhinos, so I was excited, but since they were lying down I couldn’t tell whether they were black or white rhinos. For those who are not rhino experts, let me explain. Black and white has nothing to do with the rhinos colors, it has to do with their lips. White rhinos have square lips while black rhinos have round.

Buffalo and pelicans

After a bit of driving we reached Nakuru Lake, itself. The park before now was nothing compared to the lake. There were birds everywhere!!! There were also large migrating flocks of Great White Pelican. There are reasons these birds are called Great White Pelicans. They are gigantic. We also spotted a Grey Heron, a Glossy Ibis, an African Spoonbill, a Great Cormorant, a Blacksmith Lapwing, a Yellow-billed Stork, a Crowned Plover, a Grey Crowned Crane and finally, to mom’s delight a flock of Greater Flamingos.

Flamingos for mom

This was all at the worst time to look at birds. I could have stayed at this lake for hours. Unfortunately we actually had to get back home. So with a heavy heart but a much fuller bird list, I left Nakuru behind. Which was okay, because I visited two parks the next day, which possibly held more fun than even birds. Possibly...

Grey Crowned Crane.

Long Way Down - Kenya I

2012-02-18T11:59:00.000-08:00

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Recipe: Chicken wrap

Ingredients
1/8 tsp Chili Powder
2 tbsp yogurt cheese (press all the liquid out of yogurt by wrapping it in cheesecloth, putting it in a sieve, and placing a bag of beans on top. Let drain for a few hours).
Bunch of cilantro
Salt to taste
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 cloves garlic
1/2 small onion
1 chicken breast
1/4 tsp cumin
Handful lettuce
1 small tomato, chopped

Directions
Sauté onions in oil until translucent. Add garlic, chicken and spices and sauté until chicken is done. Meanwhile, spread tortilla with yogurt cheese, add cilantro, lettuce and tomato, and then add fry-up and wrap it.
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It is, I will admit, a little bit strange to receive a call from your parents asking how you would feel if they moved to Kenya. Even if you are at the time living in Africa, and even if you feel great about it, there’s still something displacing about seeing the home you lived in your entire life get sold, and your parents move one whole ocean and a good part of a continent away. On the other hand, since I happened to move across the same ocean, at least it wouldn’t take me an entire day to fly to them. At least, that was the theory.
    I left Edinburgh for Kenya at seven in the morning. This particular day it was very windy in London and due to the wind delays, both my plane out of Edinburgh, and my plane out of Heathrow taxied to a remote part of the runway, and shut off for an hour or two (okay, not to be critical of Heathrow airport, I know it’s really big and everything, but it’s located in London the place is windy the place is foggy you think they would have figured a system out by now).
    By the time I reached Cairo I had missed my direct flight to Kenya (four hours) and instead got routed through Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (six hours) where I had a four hour layover, and then flew back up to Kenya (two hours). By the time the plane landed in Tanzania whenever I stood up I felt as though I was on the prow of a boat that was making its way through very stormy waters.
    Landing in Tanzania was a lot like landing in Malawi. Tanzania is, granted much more humid than Malawi - it’s the type of air that when you walk through it, it actually feels wet. But as we unloaded onto the tarmac and walked into the rather small airport it was the similarities that hit me. The trees, bits of the language, even the dress styles of the tourists. I spent a while in the waiting room watching a bird fly around. It had its nest in a light, and was able to fly in and out so easily because the Tanzanian airport, like the Malawi airport, is fairly open - the walls don’t quite connect to the ceiling, and here and there, doors to the outside are just left ajar.
    I thought about all the airports I’d been through in the past few months. About the closed in tunnels of Dulles, about the crowded waiting rooms of Heathrow, and the soldier with the semi-automatic machine gun who was in my tram at Charles Du Gaul, to the palm trees lining the shiny new corridors in Cairo, and even about Edinburgh, where a jolly customs official welcomed me in and said he hoped I had a lovely year. I thought about all of this as I sat there looking out at this bird I recognized, against a backdrop I recognized, in an airport style I remember quite well, and I don’t think it was up until that moment that I truly realized how much I had missed it all.
    We were escorted to the flamingo café for breakfast, although I wasn’t hungry, since I had already eaten a dinner on both my flights (side note, has anyone even had lunch on a flight? I was thinking back, and I couldn’t remember a single time). I sat down with three people who work in Uganda, which was nice. It’s always a relief to meet people who work in Africa, because no matter where they work of what they do, there is a common affinity of understanding there.
    It’s actually very difficult for me to talk about what Malawi was like to people who have never spent an extended amount of time in Africa. This is because while I can describe in perfect detail my village, or day to day life, I don’t really think I will ever be able to even come close to conveying what living in a village was actually like. In some ways, the experience is like a word unique to a language, untranslatable. It’s fortunate for me that a lot of people in my graduate school either A) are from Africa or B) have worked and lived in Africa.
    After spending a nice four hours checking “Dar es Salaam airport” off my list of places to go in life I loaded onto an airplane and finally took off for Kenya. By the time I landed in Kenya I had been in transit for 28 hours. Imagine my relief then, when there were only three people in front of me in the visa line. I went up and handed over my thirty pounds for a visa, the immigration official took them, looked at them, then looked at me.

Scottish pounds. Note the Bank of Scotland on lefthand edge, and Sir Walter Scott.

    “I can’t accept these,” he said. “They’re Scottish pounds.”
    I replied that I knew that, but that Scottish and British pounds were the same.
    “No,” he pointed out. “These say ‘Royal Bank of Scotland’ on them, and they have different people.”
    “Right,” I replied. “Because these are issued in Scotland. But Scotland and Britain are part of the same country. It’s just the same.”

British Pounds. Note the "Bank of England" above and Queen.

    To which he stated that while he was fully aware that Scotland and Britain were part of the same country the Kenyan government had stated that they were not accepting pounds from the Royal Bank of Scotland (which actually might be smart, there’s a lot of counterfit Scottish currency running around right now. We got an e-mail from the school telling us exactly what to check - watermarks and so forth - and it was just like, that’s all well and good guys, but honestly I don’t even know who’s face is supposed to be on there).
    “Well the Kenyan government is wrong.” I said firmly, and as an excuse for saying that, I can only cite the previous 28+ hours of transit.

    Fortunately, the border official I was dealing with was quite affable and replied that be that as it may, since I was in fact standing at the Kenyan border if I wanted to get in I was probably going to have to hand over a currency the Kenyan government accepted. Luckily I had been to London recently, and happened to actually have some British pounds on me, which I promptly handed over.
    Giving me change, the border official apologized for having to give me British pounds. I let it go. At the time, the incident was frustrating, but thinking about it, the situation is a bit odd. I really like Scotland having it’s own currency. This is because I really like a lot of the cultural symbols Scotland uses to declare its uniqueness (if not its independence) from Britain. That said, to someone not living in the UK, I can see where the concept of two currencies for one country would be a bit strange.
    Two currencies aside I managed to pass through the border (thank you again patient border official) get my visa, and meet Dad in the lobby to head back to the new home in Kenya... (TBC next week)

Backyard in Virginia

Backyard in Kenya

New Years (Hogmanay)

2012-02-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

A blurry demonstration of the happiness of a giant Mariachi hat

On the first night of New Years Alan and I went out to a Tex-Mex restaurant. Maybe I should explain. You know how there are twelve days of Christmas (theoretically I mean, I've only ever experienced one) well, in Edinburgh there are three days of New Years, which is referred to as "Hogmanay" (mercifully pronounced, Hogmanay).
We went out to Tex-Mex, because, even though Edinburgh is not known for it's latin flavored border cuisine, I had been craving Tex-Mex almost since I got here. This is because Tex-Mex is culturally inculcated into my system. It reminds me that no matter how far I travel, there are always cute waiters I can flirt with in Spanish, excellent friends, and a gigantic hat and mariachi band waiting for me back at home.  So, on the Eve of New Year’s Eve Alan and I went out to a restaurant called “Pancho Villas”. That should have been our first clue. We sat down and were waited upon by a young man with a thick British accent (second clue) and I couldn't help noticing there were no tortilla chips on our table... or anyone else's (third clue, and we shoulda left). 

Hey look, a bunch of people with torches

To start, I ordered guacamole, which comes with a side of chips. The chips arrived cold, and when I asked the waiter if he could warm them up he responded with, “Like... how?” But then managed to take them away and imbue them with heat somehow. I then tasted the guacamole... and a small part of me died inside. It really did. I have never been more tempted in my life to become a chef, simply so that I could then go back to the kitchen, and make good guacamole.  I fail to understand why Edinburgh - city of castles, enlightened thinking, celtic music, the deep fried Mars bars, and first (and so far only) Unesco world heritage site of literature cannot come up with good Tex-Mex food. It's really not that hard. It's tomato, cheese, salsa, and some form of meat or beans wrapped up in a tortilla. Every dish. You guys invented the telephone for gosh sake. You're the only society in the world that has managed to pull off having men walk around in skirts. You should be able to make good Tex-Mex!  Don't get me wrong, the food was edible. It just wasn't... Tex-Mex. It was meat and cheese and salsa and beans and rice, but somehow... it wasn't quite right. Which was disappointing, but then we walked out of the restaurant into a very large crowd of people holding torches and I was reminded of why I love this city.

I should mention at this point that no one in the mob was holding pitch-forks, and that they were, in fact, part of a torch procession that wends its way throughout the city at the beginning of Hogmanny. In order to get to my dorm we actually had to wade through quite a bit of the crowd, which was fine for me as I'm small and fit through things, but a bit more nerve-wracking for Alan, whose head-height is most people's torch-height.  My dorm is on the top of a hill. It has some pretty nice views of the city. These views are even more astounding when a huge line of people with torches (when I say huge, it spread for about a mile) is wending its way through the city. I immediately called Melissa, my photographically-inclined friend, to come down so we could get pictures. Getting pictures somehow turned into walking along with the crowd, and next thing we knew we were part of the parade.  Here are some interesting facts about the city of Edinburgh: it closes when winds get above 100 km/h. In my dorm, we’re not allowed to prop our doors open, for fear of spreading fire and diseases. There are first aid kits on every floor of every building I have ever been to. And yet one day a year they allow an amazing influx of tourists (who are probably more-likely-than-usual to be inebriated) to carry torches all around the city. 

Torch parade wending its way around the city

Witnessing this action, too, really does not improve one’s faith in humanity. A guy next to me, for example, decided not to use one of the many bins labelled “Put Torch Here” at the end of the parade route, and instead dropped the torch on the ground. Fortunately, in Edinburgh 90% of the days of the year dropping a torch on the ground won’t do anything. However, the torch did not go out. So the man began stamping on it. By the time the torch went out he wasn’t really paying attention, because he was now trying to stamp out the fire on his jeans. Which he did. But it still makes you wonder.  At the end of the parade we climbed Calton Hill, which is an amazing lookout that offers fantastic 360 degree views of the city. Once on the hill we ended up standing right next to the place they were shooting fire-works off (again, from the city where it is illegal to prop my door open).

The next day was New Years Day. I was fairly excited to see what New Years in Edinburgh was like. There are two answers to this. 1) Crowded. 2) Crowded.
For New Years Eve Alan and I went out to an enormous street party, which I had bought tickets to because all my friends were going. And even though all of us did go, we didn’t really run into each other. That was because the party (which happened over a few blocks) was so crowded. How crowded was it? Well when my friends called to try to meet up with us, we couldn’t. We literally could not push a block through the crowd to find them. But then we listened to some celtic music, and watched some more fireworks, and I have to hand it to the city of Edinburgh, which was selling faux beer bottles that night. They look like glass, but they're plastic. Brilliant. Utterly brilliant. Every other city in the world should adopt this.

At midnight there were more fireworks, (always fireworks) and everyone sang Auld Lang Syne while holding hands in small circles of people. Which was really quite fun. New Years day Alan took off for Malawi, (I'm sure he was happy about the timing) and I packed up to go visit mom and dad in Kenya. More on that next week.

vacationing!

2012-01-28T07:27:00.000-08:00

Recipe: Spinach Parmesian Risotto
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Ingredients
1/3c Rice
2c chopped Spinach
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1 tbsp Olive oil
Bit of parsley, if you so choose

Instructions
Pop the rice into the rice cooker. Meanwhile, sauté onions until translucent, add spinach and garlic and when spinach is just wilted add to rice. (So rice will be about halfway done in the rice cooker, and now you are just adding the spinach, onions and garlic in to cook along with the rice) After rice is finished grate in some parmesian and add salt and pepper to taste, add parsley to garnish.
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As classes started up this past week I began running into people I knew again, and starting up the old familiar conversation, “How are you, how was your vacation, how are classes?” a similar theme began to emerge. While everyone was (for the most part) happy with their classes, there was a reluctance to return to school. This is because while school is in session we tend to walk a well-worn path - home, school, library, home - and rarely deviate from it.
Then, suddenly, classes ended, and like patients waking from a coma we all suddenly realized we live in Edinburgh. There are numerous traditions, events, and attractions in Edinburgh. As I sat down trying to write a blog about the few of them that I experienced over the holidays I realized something: the blog was going to be ten pages long before I ever got through half. So here, in it’s place, is a small sampling of the things Alan and I did when I was FINALLY FINISHED WISH CLASS! (Finals were stressful, is that coming through adequately? I’m not sure, sometimes I think I’m too subtle).

1) Firstly, we went to bars. This may be shocking to some people who know me as not that big a drinker, but I’ll have them know that I ordered a whole pint of coke or sprite almost every night (no, seriously) and nursed it for a good three hours while listening to celtic music. The music in Scottish pubs is to me incomparable. Not least because it’s free, and certainly not least because you can join in (see photo). But only if you are Hannah.

Tree! (Photo cred Alan)

2) We went out and (I) hugged some trees. Specifically Redwood trees. They were located at Edinburgh’s botanical gardens (about a mile from my house). The breadth of species in the garden is incredible. As are the number of birds. As is standing on top of a mountain filled with Chinese flora, and looking out over miles and miles of tightly packed buildings below you. Most incredible of all though, is getting outside and enjoying all six hours of daylight. Going to the library while it was still dark (at nine o’clock) and then coming home when it was dark (at four o’clock) was thoroughly depressing. (Really, finals were hard. Have I been clear about this?)

Attack of the birds (photo cred Alan)

3) We fed the birds! This was really cool, as being able to throw bread in the air and watch the seagulls dive for it is amazing. I just wish I hadn’t ever watched “The Birds”.

4) We saw actual Reindeer (from Cairngorns National Park in Scotland)! I felt a bit sorry for them though, and wished they were back in Cairngorns National park.

Christmas Market

5) We walked through the Christmas market. Or rather, sort of levitated with the flow of traffic through the Christmas market. But it was still cool to see all the food and kitschy stuff. The rides weren’t as cool. Especially as they took over Prince’s Garden, which is my running and peaceful space.

Stirling Castle

6) We visited Stirling castle, which is the most beautiful castle I have seen so far in Scotland. It also has a very interesting history, which nice guides will tell you about for free, and has re-makes of the Unicorn tapestries (the originals of which are currently displayed in the cloisters in New York.) I tried asking a man dressed as the Queen’s regent if they were on display because they had once been in the castle, but apparently the actors in the castle all have to stay in character. It was very hard to phrase my question so that a man speaking as if the 16th century is present day could answer it.
    Me: So those tapestries. Are they hanging in the castle now because they were here back in... now?
    Regent: Excuse me madam?

    Finally we worked it so that the regent said “we have records of different tapestries believed to be from the unicorn series on display over a few centuries.” Whoo!

7) We went to Edinburgh zoo to see the brand new pandas! Then watched the PENGUIN WALK! SO CUTE! (is it clear I think one of these is much more exciting than the other?) I then got kicked out early because 100km winds were knocking down trees. Which I thought was totally lame. It’s Edinburgh. Trees get knocked down. If you haven’t learned to dodge the errant flying trashcan yet, then you don’t belong here.

8) We headed down to London to see the sights. And the clock counting down to the Olympics. It was nice (especially an Italian dinner of buffalo mozzarella pizza) but I still prefer Edinburgh. I could spend a few weeks alone in the Victoria and Albert museum, though. The British museum may be bigger but to me nothing beats the sheer beauty of the Victoria and Albert. Maybe it’s something about layout, but the V&A makes you want to move in (or appropriate all the objects), while the British museum just makes me feel overwhelmed.

9) We travelled up to the highlands (because no one should come to Scotland without seeing the highlands). Initially, I was afraid the highlands would be cold, dark, and possibly slushy and dull. Instead, they looked like this. We stayed at the world’s cutest B&B by the seashore. It had a huge tub (with lion claw feet!) and I locked myself into the bathroom for about an hour, enjoying the bubble bath I had gotten for Christmas, and read a book. Though we didn’t go to Loch Ness, we did tour Fort George, an active fort, but also a historical landmark. Located on the Firth of Moray, it’s incredibly scenic, as well as being thoroughly interesting. There’s something to the highlands. Edinburgh is incredible, but it doesn’t have the same romance as the highlands. You arrive up there and you just feel peaceful - as though any minute sweeping music is going to start playing in the background. Everything you see seems straight out of a book, and eventually you realize that is because the highlands is what people write about. Whenever you open a book hoping to escape, the highlands, in one form or another, is where you are trying to go. Also, cows. CUTE cows!

10) We climbed Arthur’s seat at Holyrood park. Holyrood park is a tailor-made escape in the middle of the city. Here, Alan and I stand on top of Arthur’s seat (the historical significance of which no one can really figure out although they are quick to state Arthur is very frequently and validly associated with Scotland). Arthur’s seat offers great 360 views of the city. I could wander Holyrood for days.

A bit of Celtic culture

2012-01-20T05:17:00.000-08:00

RECIPE: ARTISPROUTS
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So for a while now, I've been buying most groceries from the farmer's market that happens every Saturday morning on the castle terrace. Now unlike at a grocery store, at the farmers market, the food doesn't tend to be labeled. Which is fine. Typically one knows the difference between a tomato and a pepper, and when it comes down to - for example - the difference between kale and spinach, no one is going to look at you funny if you ask. So it was that one day at the farmers market I bought a branch of what I assumed were baby artichokes. For the whole week I looked up artichoke recipes online and cooked artichoke dip, and artichoke pie, and artichoke pasta and at the end of the whole experience concluded I just didn't like artichokes very much. Which might be true. Except that about a week ago I was wandering through the grocery store (in which food is labeled) and realized that what I had been eating was in fact brussel sprouts. Now, I could use this as a jumping off point for my blog, which would then talk about how in life things aren't always what you expect them to be (which is very true) but I'm actually just going to leave it as a funny anecdote about vegetable mix-ups, and the blog is going to be about Scottish dancing. Which I think is much more fun.
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Me and Alan in Scotland, where it's just a tad bit colder than Malawi

A while ago my friend Jesi from Malawi came to visit. Just after she arrived she turned to me and asked, naturally enough, "So, what is there to do around here?" To which I replied. "Well, there's going to class, and then there's going to the library." Because while I do tend to hang out with friends, or go to cultural events, while class is in session I don't really do too much touristy stuff.

    Which is why, when classes ended and Alan (also of Malawi) came to visit me over the holidays, I was determined that we would climb every castle, tour every art museum, and stroll leisurely through all the parks Edinburgh has to offer (just google map it and look for the green if you really want to see how ridiculous that is) and in general, soak up every tiny little piece of culture Scotland has to offer.
    This was, perhaps, rather unrealistic of me. However, despite the fact that he never visited Edinburgh’s second-hand bookshops, ate a deep-fried Mars bar or tried haggis, Alan maintains that he did in fact have an excellent time and experience a good amount of Scottish culture.
    Starting with the Gaelic service at my church. I’d been wanting to go to the Gaelic service for a while, probably due in large part to my strange fascination with totally obscure languages (e.g. my history of taking Sanskrit in college, or my determined efforts to master Chitumbuka for the past three years). I also thought seeing how a Gaelic service was structured would be a really cool, very uniquely Scottish experience.
    While I was right, what I had overlooked was that attending a service in a different language meant that I would not understand any of it. So it was that as I stared at the program I suddenly realized I didn’t know the hymns from the scripture readings from the sermons.
    As it turned out the hymns were pretty easy to get the hang of. The music would start playing and everyone would stand up. My ability to follow along ended just about there though, because while the tunes were familiar ones (such as “Hark the Herald Angels sing”) they were printed in Gaelic. Which would have been okay, were Gaelic not the most un-phonetic language you can imagine. For example “ceilidh” is pronounced “kay-lee”, “Samhuinn” is “saw-ain” and - my favorite - “claidheamh mòr” is “claymore.” Of course. So looking down at the words while everyone cheerfully sings around you, one realizes one doesn’t have a prayer.
    But it was still fun. The Gaelic language is beautiful. This impressed me most when I was listening to the soloist, who sang two really slow, almost sad songs. Strangely enough, they reminded me of the large fields in the highlands, long and lonely and slightly cold, but still gorgeous. Gaelic music can embody the words “hauntingly beautiful” better than anything I’ve ever encountered.
    Conversely, it can also be incredibly cheerful, as it was later that night when we attended a Ceilidh (yet another Scottish cultural event!). I think I’ve mentioned them before, but Ceilidhs are
traditional Scottish dances. There are many different sets of dances that can be performed in a Ceilidh, and typically they are performed by pairs or small groups who stand around in a large circle. Ceilidhs are possibly my favorite thing about Scotland, and that is saying a lot.

My flat-mate Wendy twirling at the Ceilidh. Note the kilt. Ceilidh!

    I was pretty excited at the opportunity to drag Alan to one. Alan was, perhaps, less excited, as he is 6 foot 4 and has difficulties with events where children from the ages of 5 to 10 can reasonably be expected to be his partners. At the beginning of one of the latter pieces the caller announced, “now duck under the two people in front of you” and I heard from about three couples away “Duck? But I don’t duck!” a bit too late because the music had already begun and we were already whirling away in opposite directions.
    I have long had this complaint against American parties: there is no communal dancing. Communal dancing is AWESOME. It gives you something to do besides eat and drink, and despite what you might think it actually does allow you to socialize with others. Above all, though, it is an expression of exuberance. And if you were not exuberant before you hit the dance floor, you sure as heck are after being whirled from partner to partner for a few rounds. I defy anyone to do-si-do, stomp, hop and spin without cracking a smile. Social dancing is wonderful, and as soon as I’m back in the states I aim to single-handedly reintroduce it at general social events everywhere.
    Being able to kick my holidays off with a dance, was, I have to say, probably the best way I’ve ever found to mark the end of harrowingly stressful finals, and a pretty incredible beginning to a vacation. Despite the minor ducking incident (and the fact that he did not possess a kilt to wear) Alan mostly agreed.

Castles make life fun!

2012-01-12T13:22:00.000-08:00

Recipe: Christmas Gingerbread Castle
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The final product, viewed from the side.

So for Christmas this year, I really wanted to have a Christmas party where we decorated a gingerbread castle. In this endeavor, I am indebted to Melissa, who came over and actually made the castle while I decorated the kitchen. In order to make the castle we (and by we I mean Melissa) cut out a cardboard mold of a rather broad horizontal rectangle - about the size of half a piece of paper - and another cardboard mold of a turret, which was basically a long skinny vertical rectangle with three squares at the top. We (again, Melissa) made 16 of the turrets and stuck them together in groups of four to form a cube. We (still Melissa) placed the turrets in a position where they marked off four corners of a square, and then placed one of the horizontal rectangles as a wall between each of them. It was delicious. Although offering less decorating opportunities than your traditional house, it is fun to devour the gummy-baby army you had occupying the courtyard, and also awesome to make a moat. Plus: castle.

Melissa's dragon, Napoleon, is pleased with his new domain.

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Being in graduate school has taught me many things. I have learned about the various incarnations of development, about gold-mining in Africa, about how the world will end in 2050 when the population explodes/climate change takes over/we run out of food/we run out of fresh water. One of the most important things I have learned, however, is how crucial it is to live next door to a castle.


The castle. Side note: This is what Edinburgh looks like at 2pm in November.

    Living next door to a castle is important for many reasons. There’s the good views of the city it provides, the expansive royal gardens that inevitably get made into public gardens, and the satisfaction of - when someone asks the question “where do you live” - being able to answer “well, you know the castle?”
    Apart from all that though there are the events. All year long, all the castles around Scotland hold various events. This is why having an Historic Scotland membership is handy. Not only does it get you into all Historic Scotland properties for free, for a year, for 35 pounds (I recovered the value in two weeks) it also gets you in free for all events. Convenient when you live next door to a castle. So far, I have attended two events at Edinburgh castle. The first was a fireworks display for St. Andrew’s day, the second a caroling session.
    St. Andrew’s day occurs on 30th November, the feast day for St. Andrew, who is the patron saint of Scotland. As a result, fireworks are set off. From the castle esplanade.
    Although I was in the middle of writing final essays at this point, I decided it was worth it to pop next door and watch pretty explosions in the sky. I didn’t realize in order to see the fireworks I would have to sit through a presentation on all the historic figures Scotland has produced. Tiny location like Scotland, you’d think the list wouldn’t be that extensive - unless you’ve ever actually read a history book. For such a small landmass, Scotland has produced a ridiculous number of persons who have helped to shape modern life as we know it.
    So I sat freezing while a narrator read out the achievements of the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle, David Hume, Adam Smith, Alexander Graham Bell, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, James Watt, James Boswell, and James Young Simpson. The greatest part of the presentation was that out of a list of names which included one man who invented the telephone, and another who invented anesthesia, it was Sean Connery who received the loudest applause. I’m not ashamed to say I was a large contributor to this. Anesthesia is awesome. But it’s Sean Connery.
    Then the main event began.

    I grew up in D.C. I’m used to some pretty impressive fireworks. I remember standing on the mall and being able to feel the reverberations of the explosions in my chest, and seeing displays so dramatic it seemed as if the fire was about to start raining down around me. It’s still not as impressive as fireworks backlit by a castle. Especially when they’re being shot off right next to you (this by the same people who won’t let us prop our doors open for risk of fire).
    There were fireworks that corkscrewed into the air, leaving snaking trails of gold in their wake, there were fireworks that split in the air and buzzed around, there were the traditional large fireworks. Then there were more intricate designs, like the Scottish flag, which was created by shooting off a blue rectangle (cannot have been easy) and overlaying it with a silver X (really cannot have been easy). All in all, it was an incredible show.
    In stark contrast to the fanfare was the next event at the castle. Christmas caroling held inside the castle proper, in the great hall. Going to see the carols was my first time actually inside the castle, and in order to put the experience into context I have to explain that as a member of Historic Scotland I sometimes get advertisement e-mails. One of these was an e-mail asking me if I had ever considered marrying at Edinburgh castle. With pictures, the e-mail described how I could have a small ceremony at the lovely St. Margaret’s chapel, and then have an impressive reception in the great hall. So it was with this frame of reference that I first visited Edinburgh castle.
    I peered into St. Margaret’s chapel, but didn’t bother going in for the simple reason that I wasn’t sure I’d fit. The e-mail said you could fit 25 people into the chapel, which reminded me of bit of the idea of clowns in a VW beetle. Not necessarily what I associate with a day of bliss but hey, maybe for some people?
    As for the great hall, it is splendid. Simply breathtaking. It’s an old stone ediface (naturally) with sweeping high rafters carved and painted in an intricate diamond pattern. The walls are lined with carved wood pieces, and there is a magnificent fireplace in the front of the room.


Happy Holidays (the tree is multi-faith)

    There is also the small matter of all the weaponry lining the walls. Battle axes, swords, pistols, maces - the collection is in all different styles, from many different eras. Again, not, perhaps, the image I would choose to evoke on a day dedicated to eternal love. I also could not help thinking that for certain families the combination of a large gathering, an open bar, and that many sharp edges might not be a good one, but again, for some people, I’m sure it strikes just the right chord.
    Oddly enough, it did for Christmas. The historic society had placed a fake log in the fire, a tree in the corner, and the national opera’s choir at the front of the room. They sang carols and I think it was the first time I had heard carols sung in over three years. When they started into “Good King Wenceslas” replete with British accent, I almost cried.
    I’ve talked, year after year, about trying to find my Christmas. I mentioned that despite all my good experiences the last few years, the season still lacked a slight festive atmosphere. No more. Here in Edinburgh I have found jolly, I have found cheer, and they even have spiced apple cider. ‘Tis the seasons and there is tinsel and twinkle aplenty. And if it comes with a side of swords and battle axes, well, that’s just the castle’s way of adding in a little bit of culture.

Higher and Higher Education

2012-01-01T14:02:00.001-08:00

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RECIPE: Tex-Mex stuffed pumpkin

Note: Use small pumpkins. This will also work with any winter squashes (like butternut). I can only speak for the efficacy of this recipe with British/former British colony pumpkins, as I really didn't eat any sort of squash in America. I sort of remember American pumpkins being sweeter, which wouldn't work, but maybe that's just because I only ever ate them in pumpkin pies form.

Ingredients
1/2 cup rice
2 small pumpkins
1 tsp cumin
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Handful chopped cilantro
1/8th (1/4th if you are VERY brave) tsp chili powder
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1-2 cloves garlic
2 tsp lime juice (more if you like limey zing!)
1/2 tsp lime zest

Instructions
Use your flat-mate's rice cooker to cook the rice. As she describes it, stick your pointer finger in, and fill rice cooker with water up to the end of your nail. Cut the top off the pumpkins, gut them, then cook using your favorite method (either in the oven, or by steaming, which is my preference). Meanwhile, chop the onion and the garlic. Over medium heat, sauté the onions in oil until they are almost transparent, then lower the heat a notch and add the garlic and cumin and chili pepper. Take out the pumkins once they are soft, and scoop out the insides. Mix this with the rice. Add the lime zest, onion mixture, then the cilantro. Lastly, salt and pepper to taste, and put back into the pumpkin if you enjoy eating out of gourds. If not, just eat plain. Pumpkin is very healthy.
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    So, it turns out this interesting thing happens in Scotland in the wintertime. The sun disappears. More accurately, it rises at nine and sets by four. The rest of the time the sky is filled with this dull grey light normally associated with early dawn, so that when you are walking around at about 2 pm it feels like 10 am and is going to feel like 10 pm in three hours. To make matters all the better, the beginning of finals coincides with this loss of daylight. No wonder they make you pay your entire tuition in October.
    Now, however, I am done with exams and have found the bleak midwinter not quite so bleak when you spend all six hours of daylight outside, and are surrounded by a twinkling, tinseling, on-display city.
    As this is the close of my first semester of graduate school, however, I have been thinking a lot about higher education as an institution. Even more so because in the UK tuition fees are currently being ratcheted up at an incredible rate (3,000 pounds per year for domestic students this year goes up to 9,000 pounds per year for domestic students next year).
    This change doesn’t affect me at all, but it does get me thinking. UK students are getting extremely upset about this price rise, and quite frankly, I think they should, but the opinion of the American students is by and large “Are you kidding? Do you know how cheap that is for college?” because we’re sitting around paying about 40,000 dollars per year. And we will pay these fees, and more, because, rightly or wrongly, you need a college degree for most jobs, and over time the expense will pay itself off multiple times.
    Then there’s graduate school. Which is needed simply to get some jobs, or to advance in others, and is typically another two years of school, and possibly another few thousand dollars. And top it all off with the fact that last month one of my professors said in class, “Of course you need a Ph.D. to really be taken seriously.” The depressing thing is not that he said this, it’s that he’s right.
    To go into this issue in depth I would have to get very ranty and go on for a while, which is not the intention of this blog. I do want to bring up two things, though. The first is the question of the proliferation of graduate school, and the fact that college is becoming basic education and a master’s degree something you need for a specific profession. Which seems to me a bit odd, because I feel that somewhere in between thirteen years of general schooling and four years of higher education it should be possible to impart sufficient skills for a person to be ready for all but the most specialized profession.
    Secondly, if college is to become the new basic standard of education (which it seems it already has) then charging as much as we do for it is indefensible, and I applaud the UK students for standing up to the changes now, before it gets completely out of control.
     The generations entering the workforce now are qualified, competitive, and congested. With too many people and too few jobs the education system is tilting more towards... well, more. If this trend continues the next generation entering the workforce is going to have seven letters behind their name, a whole lot of debt in the bank, and thirty-five years of studying before they get their first jobs.
These were my post-exams musings. Post musings I toured about seven different castles, sunk myself in art, and in general got back into the Scottish spirit. More on that in a few days. In the meantime, I hope everyone has had a happy new years, and am sorry about the delay in blogging. I'm going to make up for it in the next week or so, and try to plan so finals don't completely take over my life ever again.

Halloween/Samhuinn

2011-11-20T12:45:00.001-08:00

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RECIPE: Halloween chocolate fudge icing.

Ingredients:
1 Cup milk
1/2 cup chocolate chips
2 tbsp butter
1/3 c icing sugar

Instructions
Place all ingredients in a double boiler in order. Melt chocolate before proceeding to butter. Transfer mixture to a bowl once it forms a film when placed on a spoon and cool it. Spread on many things, or just eat it with your finger. Nom.

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It's always funny how Halloween means different things in different places. At home, Halloween was first trick-or-treating, and later partying with my friends. At college in Charlottesville, Halloween meant heading down to the lawn and watching parents take their adorable little children from lawn room to lawn room to trick-or-treat. In Malawi, Halloween was going up to the most remote location in the country and roasting an entire pig. No matter where I am, though, no matter how different Halloween gets, it seems there is always one conundrum every Halloween has in common: What am I going to be?
This Halloween the dilemma was compounded by two facts: 1) It was my flat-mates’ first Halloween, so I wanted to celebrate in style, and 2) I didn’t want to spend any money.

Me with my flat-mates

    I spent the weeks before Halloween in angst, trying to come up with creatively brilliant ideas that usually ended up being just plain weird. I thought variously about being: trash (sticking trash to me), popcorn (sticking popcorn to me), or a superhero (tying the pashmina from my bridesmaid outfit around my back). Running these various ideas by my flat-mates I received the same response. “Okay?” (The question mark is deliberate).
    The day before Halloween, ideas still running around my head much like the proverbial hamster with its ever-faithful wheel, I suddenly thought about my coat. This particular winter coat is long, and black, has a hood, and runs down to my ankles. As a certain man in a bathtub once cried: Eureka! I would be Death. I turned to my flat-mate. “What do you think about me being Death for Halloween?” I asked. She tilted her head, thinking about it.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “Death is always good.”
    While the costume idea fit, however, it didn’t have that flare of the original (read: weird) that I so desire in everything I do, so I mulled the idea over some more and came up with the second part much quicker than I had come up with the first. I WOULD BE DEATH FROM THE TERRY PRATCHETT NOVELS.
    For those of you who have never read the Terry Pratchett novels, step away from the computer NOW and head to your nearest library. Mr. Pratchett writes a series of novels set in an alternate world known as “the discworld” so called, because the world is a flat disc. It is an obvious metaphor for our world, and his books are incredible. Witty, insightful, humorous, well-written. On days when I was down in Malawi, listening to Terry Pratchett on audio, my iPod lifted my sprits beyond belief. (“Going Postal” and “Making Money” are the best, in my humble opinion).
    Which brings us to Death. In Terry Pratchett’s novels, Death is a character. He’s humorous without intending to be, AND HE ALWAYS SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS. No quotes. So, Halloween day I bought a scythe, wrote on a piece of paper I ALWAYS SPEAK IN CAPITAL LETTERS, and donned my coat. I felt pretty good about the whole ensemble.
    Apparently, my feelings were justified. Standing out on the Royal Mile, I had at least four strangers turn to their traveling companions and say “Hey ______, get a picture of me with this girl!” stand next to me in some ridiculous pose while their friend snapped a photo before I could even react. A few people got my sign, and it was always nice to get that recognition, but even without it, I liked my costume.

Beltane fire society

At nine o’clock, my flat-mates, my friend Melissa and I all thronged the street in front of Edinburgh Castle to watch the Beltane Fire Society’s festival for Samhuinn. In traditional Celtic culture, Samhuinn is supposed to be the time when the world of the living and the world of the dead are closest. In recognition of this, the society put on a parade, where people in black cloaks carrying torches marched in front of people painted blue and playing drums, people painted red, people wearing green clothes, and people carrying puppets and masks on poles and wires high above their heads. It was pretty neat.

Cool fire symbol that almost certainly has meaning

We followed the parade down to Parliament Square, where they were going to perform a show on stage. Almost the second the parade passed by it had begun to rain, so by the time we got to Parliament Square we were soaked, and umbrellas blocked the view. I managed to get on the side of a statue though, and got a pretty good view from there. I watched as, in a series of dances set to a drum-line, Winter and Summer fought, and Summer was beaten. (Awww, said Melissa, as Summer fell to the ground). At the beginning, when Summer was up, the society lit a huge symbol, which had been hung in the air, on fire. In the end, when Winter won, a new symbol was lit.
Even if we were soaked, the whole thing was pretty cool. I went home to my heated flat, and sat around in one of my flat-mate’s room, where we put on blueberry face masks. It may not be dressing up and getting bucket-loads of candy, but it was still a pretty great Halloween.

Suzy and Michael's wedding

2011-11-07T14:19:00.001-08:00

    About ten years ago my friend Suzy and I were playing Super Mario on an N64. The particular part we were playing was not a level, but a secret bonus zone. In this bonus zone Mario would get a prize if one could manage to successfully maneuver a penguin down an iced race course in a set time.
    It was tricky. The penguin had to go fast enough to beat the time, but going faster meant it was harder to steer, and the penguin would fly around a turn and careen off the edge of the course into space. Midway through playing, for some reason, I turned to Suzy and asked “Do you have a crush on Michael?” to which Suzy responded, “I don’t want to talk about it!” So we kept racing the penguin.
    Fast forward ten years to when Suzy and Michael are standing in a pagoda in the middle of Brookside Botanical gardens. I am slightly off to the side, surrounded by three other bridesmaids. And as Suzy and Michael, in front of family and friends, exchange vows to love and care for one another their whole lives long, all I can think is ‘you know, we never got that penguin down the course in time.’
    High school is harped upon a lot in American culture. There are movies about it, books about it, T.V. shows about it. In exploring these media I’m always struck by one simple fact - none of those representations seem anything like my experience.
    Nobody in those stories sits around talking about how cool their teachers were. Nobody in those shows still carries around inside jokes so that people occasionally ask them why they are pretending to be a fish, or an existential block that sits around wondering what forces are acting on it. No one in those stories still calls up their friends from high school no matter where they/you are in the world, just to check in. But then, none of those people ever went to H-B Woodlawn.
    People talk about how nice it is to be able to be part of a friend’s wedding. How wonderful it is to be able to share in this amazing moment of someone’s life. When everyone in the bridal party knows each other? Take that factor and double it. Then you get moments like two bridesmaids whopping a groomsman with their bouquets (he deserved it!) or the groom giving one of the bridesmaids a look that clearly says, ‘I saw you almost trip on that third stair’ or the bride swing-dancing with one of the bridesmaids because a bunch of you took lessons back in seventh grade, and could still sing the song you danced to for the recital from memory - if asked. It’s an amazing thing to share in a friend’s wedding. It’s even more amazing if almost everyone involved is someone you don’t feel you could have done without.
    As for Suzy and Michael themselves, I can’t really explain what having Suzy and Michael as friends has meant to me. They’ve been with me through middle school, through high-school, through college, and have kept in close contact since then. Always. Michael is one of the best guys I’ve ever met, he’s kind, he’s easy to get along with, he’ll be there for you if you need him.
    And as for Suzy... Suzy was on my speed dial my entire time in Malawi. I’m not sure how other volunteers got by without a friend at home they could call when everything was falling apart, because I know I couldn’t have. Having someone who understands why goldfish can be a main topic of conversation for an hour (and that’s not even touching on the different flavors) that’s incredibly valuable. Having someone who will listen quietly to you for an hour while you break down about how hard everything is, and how you’re not sure you can continue another day, and feeling at the end of that conversation that maybe you can, and maybe it will all be okay, that’s invaluable.
    When I say I don’t know what I would do without them I’m being completely literal. I’m so glad our group of friends has Michael and Suzy, and I’m so glad they have each other. Happy Marriage guys!

Down at the bluegrass bar

2011-10-23T05:37:00.001-07:00

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Recipe: Cinnamon Apple Muffins

Applesauce

Two cups of apples, grated (it's easier than cutting)

1 tsp of cinnamon

1/4 cup of sugar

Muffin batter

2 cups white flour

1 tbsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup sugar

1 egg

1/4 cup melted butter

Instructions

Preheat over to 375 and grease muffin tin. Cook the applesauce ingredients until they resemble applesauce. Mix dry muffin batter ingredients, then wet muffin batter ingredients, then combine dry, wet, and applesauce and mix together with a wooden spoon but not until the batter is smooth, just make sure the flour doesn't have a lot of clumps. Bake for about 20 minutes or until the knife comes out clean.

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    I meet Melissa down at “Greyfriar’s Bobby” bar. A bar named for the story of a small Scottish terrier who reputedly stayed by his master's grave in Greyfriar's kirk after the man passed away. There’s a ton of tourist merchandising surrounding the story, including a statue on the road across from the church - tourists standing back from it taking a picture always block me on my way to class. According to a girl in my master’s program, the whole story is a hoax, and there was just some dog who hung around the graveyard eating scraps. Everyone who has heard this bit of information finds it incredibly depressing, as the idea of a cute little doggie guarding the graves is irresistible. Nonetheless, the bar is nice.
    I haven’t seen Melissa since I took a weekend foray back to America for my best friend’s wedding, and we are heading over to the Royal Oak - a bar that features bluegrass in the basement on Thursday - to reconnect and meet up with Hannah, a mutual friend. Hannah is the one who actually introduced me to the Royal Oak bluegrass basement. Her professor plays in the band and he intimated to the class that good will is engendered by students appearing in the audience. No word on how many grade points that good will translates into, though.
    We settle into one of the booths as we wait for Hannah. The bar is small, but it attracts a large and eclectic crowd. Because of the size of the place, everyone has to scoot into the booth together. Two weeks before, I sat in the middle of a tour-group from England who marveled at the fact that I lived on a Royal Mile.
    “Must be a real hardship for you.” One of the women had said to me with a smile.
    Sitting down in the booth with Melissa, I pull out my notebook.
    “You mind if I write?” I ask. “I have this assignment for my creative writing class where I have to stalk someone, and I just don’t want to stalk someone, plus I don’t have the time, and really, I just want to write in the bar, I mean look at this place, you have everything, students, atmosphere, bluegrass, locals. Heck, I bet you could write a huge essay on the ales alone. Why don’t people write in bars do you think? There’s so much going on here I could write all night. It’s much better than a café.”
    “Noise, I guess,” says Melissa. “There’s so much noise here I would always be looking up distracted.” She yawns. “I took a nap after Welsh today, I don’t know why I’m tired.” She pauses. “Don’t write that down. Are you writing that down?”
    Hannah walks in. When she sits down I pull out my iPhone (which, having flipped off data roaming and taken out the SIM card I use as an iPod touch) to show her maps of the city. We’re going to a nature preserve at 6 am Saturday morning to see pink-footed geese take off for the Netherlands. We plot out routes to the house where we’re supposed to meet, and then Hannah zooms in on one part of the map.
    “You know there’s this really cool lane through the city,” she says. “It’s about a mile long. It starts around in back here...” Hannah has been exploring the city since we got here. Melissa did too, in the beginning, but recently she’s been bogged down in Gaelic (Scottish, Gah-lic) and Gaelic (Irish - Gay-lic) and Welsh.
    “Melissa do you study old or new Welsh?”
    “Middle.”
    “Thanks.”
    Recently she’s been bogged down in Gaelic, Gaelic, and middle Welsh.
    “Margaret’s being anti-social and writing”, Melissa informs Hannah.
    I look up. “I’m writing about you, actually, I hope that’s okay, I really didn’t want to stalk someone.”
    “Why would you stalk someone?”
    “Because that was the assignment.”
    “I guess we’ll just have to have really intelligent conversations then.” says Hannah.
    “And we should gesticulate a lot so she’ll have to write that down”, adds Melissa, moving her arms frenetically, a bit like a robot.
    Although Melissa lives directly across the hall from me, I met her on a literary pub tour of Edinburgh. That was my first time in the Royal Oak. We were both sitting in the corner, listening to the Celtic music (which is played upstairs) and wondering if there would be more “literary” any time soon.
    I met Hannah through Melissa. We were going out to explore some castles. The castles were each about twenty minutes outside of one of those Scottish postcard-perfect towns called North Berwick. The first one was on a seaside cliff, which offered spectacular views once we found the way up to the top of the castle. It was half ruined, so we kept having to wander around from room to room, ducking our heads as we went up this stairwell, or down this one, or through winding corridors.
    The other castle was more intact, and had amazing gardens and a yard, as well as a circular dovecote with thousands of boxes still in place. When you stood in the middle of it and looked up you could see the sun pouring in from above, and it felt a bit like what I would imagine it’s like to live in a beehive. In that castle we wandered through an intact dining room, a latrine, and an enormous basement used for food storage.
    “So, you know those old ships,” Hannah is saying. I keep wanting to listen to the conversation of the men next to us, because they seem interesting, but I never manage to pay attention. A bunch of younger people have walked in and are hanging out, standing, in the corner by the bar, and the bluegrass musicians are singing something about it not being love and it not being money, although what it actually is I never pick up because I keep getting lost in my writing, or in the flow of chatter passing around me.
    “So, you know these old ships,” Hannah says. Hannah is interested in old ships. So is Melissa. Hannah also thinks that getting up at five o’clock in the morning to see birds migrate is a good time. And Melissa likes historical observatories and climbing the Nelson monument and quoting “Firefly” from 327 feet up. We’ve all read the entire Horatio Hornblower series. This always seems to me emblematic, although I’m never entirely sure of what.
    “So, you know these old ships,” In the booth with us, sitting beside the two older Scottish men are a couple, I’m not sure from where. They are nodding their heads slowly to the music, tapping their feet while drinking something that is the color of earth, and translucent. The musicians in the corner are now singing a fast paced song about a girl, and how she captured their hearts.
    “So, you know these old ships,” Hannah is saying. “I really want to sail out and live in one.”
    I look up. “Do you mind if I use this for a blog entry?”
    Melissa turns, “Wasn’t the last one about us?”
    This is, and isn’t, true. I’ve been trying for a week now to write about the castle expedition, but besides some funny tales of trying Irn-Bru (a Scottish beverage that outsells Coca-Cola in the motherland, and tastes to me a bit like liquid candy) and descriptions of massive amounts of sheep standing in the countryside, it’s not really coming together.
    Melissa and Hannah begin a discussion on castles.
    “You know,” I say. “It’s funny how we all think so differently, yet we’re interested in the same set of things.”
    “Yeah,” interjects Hannah. “Things that are awesome.”
    “Right,” I say. “But what I mean is...”
    What I mean is that Edinburgh is a big city, and that the University itself is a big place. What I mean is that it’s not every day you find people who like going out to bars just for the music or think castles are a cool expedition. What I’m trying to say is something, in a limited sense, about Scotland, but in a larger sense about life, in general.
    It has to do with the bar and the way it’s so small and cozy with only two worn-through booths and wooden tables. It has something to do with the group of students that come here every week, as well as the locals. It’s something about the truly ridiculous variety of ales available in this country, and all the different shades from light to dark that they create when laid out across the table. It’s something, most of all, about the bluegrass band playing in the corner and the sound of the fiddle and the guitar and the harmonics of the voices when they come together and sing.
    Melissa has this theory (which she’s expounding on to Hannah right now) that there are, in fact, dragons in Scotland. That they are hidden in the lochs or among the castles or even hunkered down in the fields of heather, hiding in plain site. In the middle of the bar and the music and the sound of chatter flowing up and down the tiny room, I can almost believe that she is, in fact, right. That there’s magic in Scotland.

Open Doors Day

2011-10-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

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Recipe:

Margherita pizza

Ingredients

Dough

1 2/3 cups flour

1/3 cup water

1 tsp salt

1 package instant active yeast (if you are not using instant, make the water warm but not hot and dissolve the yeast in that and wait until the surface of the water is brown with small bubbles)

2 tbsp olive oil

Toppings

1 ball of buffalo mozzarella

1 large tomato

A bunch of basil leaves (for example, off the basil plant you grow on your windowsill in your dorm room)

2 cloves of garlic, pressed or very finely chopped

2 tbsp olive oil

THE DOUGH

There are two ways to make a pizza dough. Way one involves making it like normal bread, kneading it for ten minutes and allowing it to rise until doubled in bulk and then throwing it into the air to make a lovely pizza. Way two involves you having just come home from a bunch of castles, not having time to let it double in bulk. Not letting it rise at all, attempting to throw it up in the air, dropping it on the floor in front of all the people you are cooking it for, and then rolling it out with a rolling pin (which you are really not supposed to do with pizza). Way two still tastes really good.

For either way two, or way one: Mix flour, yeast (!unless its not instant!) and salt. Mix oil and water. Add oil and water to flour mixture. Knead it. Add flour to the dough until it becomes elastic again. Then either pick way one or way two for making a pizza dough.

THE TOPPINGS

If you like your crust brown you can stick it into the oven for ten to fifteen minutes before adding toppings. Even if you just cook it with toppings on though, it will cook through. Brush the pizza with the olive oil, and disperse the garlic over the top. Slice the buffalo mozzarella and space the pieces out over the dough, do the same thing with the tomato and the basil. You can do so in a way you think aesthetically pleasing, or not. Bake the whole thing at 1800C (350) until the cheese is very melted, even a bit brown. The basil leaves will look withered and ruined. That's okay. If you don't like that look though, add them after baking. Take pizza out of oven, share it with your flat mates.

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One of the most amazing things about living in a city, especially an historic one, is how much there is to see and do. For example, within a ten minute walk of my flat there is Edinburgh Castle, Prince’s Gardens, the Walter Scott Monument, the National Gallery of Scotland, the house that Robert Burns stayed in when he first came to Scotland, the Writer’s Museum, the National Library of Scotland, Greyfriars Kirk, the National Museum, and more. There is so much to do here. And I have homework.
    This past week, on the theory that it was better to just get it over with, I signed up to do the first oral report in one of my classes. Day after day I sat in my flat, combing through piles of articles, looking for obscure bits of information on the Iron Age. After that report, I am perfectly qualified to wear a button that says, “Ask me about pre-colonial metal smelting in Africa!”
    Saturday, however, I vowed to leave the whole day open, studying all night if I had to. This was because Saturday was Doors Open Day - a day where an incredible number of venues normally closed throughout the year let the general public in for free.
    So, Saturday I took a break. I slept in. I went for a really long run in Hollyrood Park (an awesome location that must be visited if one is in Edinburgh.) I went down to St. Margaret’s Loch and did some bird-watching. (Since arriving in the UK I have seen lesser black-backed gull, magpie, blackbird, moorhen, muted swan and tufted ducks). It wasn’t that early, but for some reason all the tufted ducks were asleep, they had their heads tucked under their wings and were spinning slowly over the water like tiny tops. It was incredibly adorable.
    At around eleven o’clock I set out for my first stop on my Doors Open Day tour - the anatomy museum. The anatomy museum is located in the department of medicine at the University. Normally, it’s only open to medical students and staff, but on Doors Open Day, anyone can visit.

    It’s a pretty cool exhibit. The whole room features instruments used back in the good-old-days of surgery of yore, as well as aged textbooks, and life and death masks of various famous figures. Oh, and of course, there’s anatomy. Lots and lots of anatomy. Shelves and shelves of skulls. More shelves of spines. A few hips. Some random bones that were laying around storage. Then there’s the non-bones. I will not go into detail here, except to say that it’s remarkable how long tissue can be preserved when suspended in the right concoction. One of the main exhibits - right in the center of the room - was a mummified dissected body. Have I mentioned that there were quite a few young kids wandering around?
    Of course, the real main attraction was the skeleton of William Burke. For those of you unfamiliar with the history, surgeons used to learn their trade by dissecting dead bodies. Of course, only executed criminals were legally allowed to be dissected, and there weren’t nearly enough of those to go around. Thus emerged the lucrative body-snatching business. For every body given, the University would pay twelve pounds (to put this in perspective, professors were paid fifteen). There was a tunnel that led underneath the building to a back entrance where bodies were picked up. There’s actually still a trap door leading to it in one of the classrooms today.
    William Burke and his partner William Hare took it a step further, and started murdering people and making a rather lucrative business of it. Until someone left something at their house, came back the next day, and found a body hidden under the bed. Oops. Unfortunately, when Burke and Hare were arrested all the evidence against them was circumstantial. So, Hare turned State’s evidence, and got away scot free, while Burke’s punishment was to be hung, dissected, and have his skeleton displayed in the medical laboratory where you can still see it now, one day out of the year.
    After this cheerful outing, we went outdoors to Calton hill, and the Old City Observatory and Astronomer’s House. Now, some events in Doors Open Day need to be booked days in advance. These tours were two prime examples. Fortunately, when I e-mailed them the day before, they had had some cancelations, and were able to squeeze me in.
    We first toured the Astronomer’s House, which has been restored by the Vivat trust, a charity that buys houses, restores them, fills them with period furniture, and then rents them out for vacations. They did a very nice job on the Astronomer’s House. The building itself is entirely too precious. It’s small, but designed in a castle-y style. There’s a magnificent view from every window and a round tower that houses three different rooms. The middle one is a dining room, my favorite part of which is an 80-pound table that is the only piece of non-period furniture and is thusly covered with a plaid tablecloth that reaches to the floor.
    In between touring the house and the observatory, we wandered around Calton Hill. Taking pictures of the view of Edinburgh, enjoying the sunshine (which has been going on for two weeks straight now), jumping off rocks, and then walking up a tower and taking quite a few more pictures of the view of Edinburgh. (From left to right: The Mylne's court crew at the astronomer's house. Me and Thomas, a friend from high-school and... FUN!)

The observatory itself is in the center of the hill, and houses two telescopes. One, on the bottom floor, is set on a straight track along the meridian. Another, inside a tower under a huge dome, was used for taking pictures of the stars, but now is just used for star-gazing. Every moving piece (including opening and closing the ceiling and rotating the dome!) has a piece of rope attached to it, so that the person sitting at the foot of the telescope can control it all remotely. I even got to make the dome rotate! It was indescribable amounts of fun.

At the end of the tour we went outside and looked through a special telescope that allowed us to see the sun. I’ve never looked at the sun through a telescope before, on account of not wanting to go blind, and I have to say, the experience is amazing. You don’t realize just how incredible the sun is, until you actually see it. I stated that it was very cool, but the astronomer overseeing the operation assured me it is, in fact, quite hot.
As we were walking home, we passed by one of the sites I had very much wanted to see, but hadn’t thought we’d have time for - the Robert Burns memorial. The reason I had wanted to see it on this day in particular (as versus any of the other 364 days you could see it) is that members of the Burns society were supposed to be reading poems, and performing them set to music.

Inside Burn's memorial

When we got inside a three-piece band (banjo, guitar, vocals) called “Ragged Glory” was performing some of Burns’ songs. They did a gorgeous rendition of “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose” and finished with a tune called “A Man’s a Man for A’ That” (good rendition here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pGWkjwOBw&feature=related). As they began the song, everyone inside the memorial started to sing along. The cool thing was, a good number of them were actually Scots, quite a few in full kilts, and you could hear the accent, and that everyone knew the tune as they sang.
There were quite good acoustics in the memorial, and I find that there’s just a certain feeling that comes from being surrounded by people singing for sheer joy. They got to the last verse, and everyone sang a-cappella. “That Man to Man, the world o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.” Singing along to Rabbie - really not a shabby way to end a pretty spectacular day.

Arrival in Edinburgh

2011-09-22T10:56:00.001-07:00

Recipe: Ming Wei's Hard-boiled Eggs in Sauce.  
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This was a dish in our first flat-mate dinner, cooked by my awesome flat-mate, Ming Wei, who brought a rice cooker that could feed about ten people, Soy Sauce, and a muffin tin when she came here from Taiwan. Told you, awesome. Unfortunately, none of my flat-mates seem to measure when cooking, but their stuff always turns out great.  

Ingredients 
Green Onion
Garlic 
Ginger
Chicken legs (cooked)
Soy sauce 
Sugar Eight star (star anise) 
Hard-boiled Eggs
Salt (to taste)

Instructions 
Fry green onion, garlic and ginger in vegetable oil. Then, throw the chicken legs in until they soak up the flavor. Take the chicken legs out, add soy sauce, sugar, and eight star (star anise) and wait 30 minutes with this on low heat. Add the eggs to the sauce. 
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It seems that whenever you arrive in a new place, the first question anyone asks (well, besides, “What’s your name?”) is “Why are you here?” In Malawi, my answer was pretty standard, “I came here to learn, to teach, and to see more of the world.” In Edinburgh, my answer is a bit more multi-pronged. On the surface, I am here for graduate school, studying toward a Master’s in International Development. That, however, doesn’t go near to explaining why.
There are many reasons why I chose to jump across the ocean for my studies. For one thing, it’s cheaper, about three times less than a Masters in the States would have cost. I also liked the look of the program I’m in - its interdisciplinary nature allows me to take pretty much any class in the University, so long as I can link it in some way to development (and provided there’s space, of course). I thought living abroad for a year would be a cool opportunity, and that it would be interesting to get to know a new city and country. Most of all though, it’s Scotland, and ever since I started visiting here when I spent a summer in London five years ago, I’ve been searching for any excuse I could find, to get back.

My flat-mates!

So far, I have no cause to regret this decision. Since the moment I stepped off the plane, it’s been amazing being back in Scotland. I knew it was going to be a good experience when the customs officer (this is customs in Edinburgh) smiled at me, welcomed me, and wished me good luck with my studies. Riding out of the airport I shared a cab with Salome, a girl from Georgia (the country, not the state) who turned out to be in the room next to mine. There are three other girls in my flat, and they are pretty much the best flat-mates anyone could ask for. Wendy and Susan are from China, and Ming Wei is from Taiwan.
The building I live in is called Mylne’s Court, and it’s situated next to Edinburgh Castle, on the Royal Mile, which is one of the main tourist streets in Edinburgh. To get to my building you duck through a small stone archway that opens up underneath a building. After traveling through a small tunnel, you reach a courtyard surrounded by three interconnected buildings, one of which I live in. This means that my entire dorm, instead of lying on one street, is actually between two.

Mylne's Court, where I live

The buildings themselves are converted tenement houses, which means that they have some more interesting aspects to them than I feel your typical new apartment complex would have. For one thing, the rooms themselves are formed a bit differently. My flat-mate Susan actually has a filled-in fireplace in her room, while I have a bookshelf built into my wall. When I first found out I was living in Mylne’s court, I was a bit afraid of what living in an older stone tenement house would feel like, but, in fact, it’s kind of nice. It’s gothic, but paradoxically enough, it’s gothic in a welcoming and homey sort of way. Of course it doesn’t hurt that my view is out the back of the building, over the spires of the Divinity School, on to Prince’s gardens, and back out over the city all the way to the harbor.

Perhaps my favorite part of the building, though, is that it illustrates one of the more interesting facts about the city: Edinburgh is built on top of Edinburgh. I was told this the day I moved in here, and saw it first hand when I crossed over a bridge and, looking down, saw another street level, thirty feet below. More recently I took a tour called “The real Mary King’s close” where we went below a building and toured streets that had been covered over centuries ago. At one point on that tour we went over a bridge and... you guessed it, when I looked down, I saw another street level, thirty feet below. Thus it is, that when you enter my building, you come in on the fourth floor. I live on the sixth floor, but on the back side of the building, and when you look down from my window, you find you are about ten stories up. Nifty!

View from my dorm window

    As for the school and city, both are pretty amazing. I still haven’t quite gotten used to living in a city that still has cobblestone streets, and a handful of castles; or the fact that I go to a school that was founded before my country. I went on a literary pub tour of Edinburgh where we went to various literary sites in the city - punctuated by breaks at pubs with live folk music - and it was incredible to see how many of these references exist in the city. This is the place of Darwin, Conan-Doyle, Stevenson and Hume (you know, last name type people).
    Even modern day, my program is pretty cool. There are fourteen people within my major, and we’re from all over the world, with incredibly diverse experiences. As wonderful as undergrad was, I don’t remember being able to discus with other students what working for the EU for the past three years was like, or being with anyone who could list “helping in the revolution” as part of their extra-curriculars. I also don’t remember going to a huge dance hall called a Ceidelh (Kay-lee), which is a shame, because it’s unbelievable amounts of fun. Especially when a surley caller is looking out over the dis-organized mish-mash of the crowd shouting (in an extremely strong brogue) “Well, I sure hope yah all can run a government better than yah can organize tah dance”.
    All in all, I’m looking forward to this year. Especially the part where I eat deep-fried Mars bars, Haggis, and black pudding.

A note: From now on my blog can also be found at: Mashsdigests.blogspot.com. All old posts from Malawi will be there as well, I am currently in the process of uploading them.

Moving

2011-09-17T00:18:00.000-07:00

Recipe: Apple Crumble---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first recipe I’ve cooked in America, Malawi, and Scotland. Apples seems to be pervasive in all three places and I feel like there’s something about apples, and apple desserts specifically, that are reminiscent of home.

Ingredients:
The filling
Four apples, cored and diced.
1/3c sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

The topping
1 1/3 c flour
1/2 c sugar
Enough butter to bind the flour and sugar (usually about half a stick)

Butter a 9 inch square baking dish, pre-heat the oven to 190C, 375F. Take about half of the diced apples and line the bottom of the baking dish. Sprinkle about half of the filling’s cinnamon and sugar over top. Repeat for the second layer. In a separate bowl mix flour and sugar. Take small cubes of the butter and use a fork to cut them into the flour and sugar until the whole mixture resembles a bowl of dried peas. Pour this evenly on top of the apples, and bake for 30-45 minutes. Longer is better because the apples become more mushy. Mmmm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     Over the past three months I’ve found myself living in three different places, in three different countries, on three separate continents. As a consequence, I have had to do a lot of moving and have realized there’s one aspect of moving people don’t talk about all that often: stuff. It is absolute incredible the amount of stuff that accumulates in the process of living somewhere. I’ve found this out in miniature every time I’ve moved, but none of it compared to (or really prepared me for) the process of moving out of the house I grew up in.
     Moving out of the house you grew up in is in itself a pretty strange experience. On the one hand, I haven’t lived there in over seven years. On the other hand, it was always comforting to know it was there; that somewhere on the earth was my bedroom, arranged as it always had been, sitting in my house, surrounded by my yard, where I used to play. What I hadn’t realized was that there was also an attic-full of things that had been accumulating since my birth.
      It’s fairly daunting to be faced with an entire room-full of giant boxes you have to sift through to decide what to throw away and what to keep. Even more so because there’s actually a strange phenomena of memory that plays into filtering through items from one’s past. Objects that you never in a million years would have remembered by yourself suddenly turn up and strike a chord of memory so profound that there is certainly no way you could ever throw them away. It is for this reason that in my permanent abode, whenever I finally get one, every available wall (including the bathroom) will be entirely lined with books, and all the surface areas will be covered with stuffed animals.
     You find strange things when sorting through an entire house. Searching through my office I stumbled on the notebook I used for second grade Spanish. I should have just tossed it out, but when I saw the sentence “Estoy muy contento porque ayer encontre un pato con cinco ptitos (sic)” written in my enormous and awkward scribble I simply couldn’t. Ditto a valentine from eighth grade that says, among other things “I like ham, do you like ham? Ham ham ham.” Ditto a letter home to my parents telling them how much I was enjoying space camp, and especially a picture taken in seventh grade of me and my six closest friends at the time, all of us dressed up in ridiculous costumes and standing in front of a painted beach scene.
     And while sorting through all of this stuff, and throwing a good portion of it out, was definitely a bit sad, what was really amazing to me was realizing how much of it is still relevant to my life now. I still speak Spanish on a regular basis, the sender of the valentine is one of my best friends, and I even communicate with a few of my friends from that year of space camp. As for the photograph from seventh grade, even though it was taken twelve years ago, I still saw everyone in it when I came home.
     I went through a similar sorting process in miniature when I came to Scotland, trying to fit everything valuable of my life into the weight restrictions for international luggage. I brought a lot of necessities of course, warm clothes, a cookbook, various journals, but I also brought a journal for recording all my bird-sightings, a book titled “Goodnight Washington, DC”, a carving of a lemur I’ve had since I was about ten, a scarf knitted for me by a Malawian neighbor, and a sweater that declares that while I’m not from Wayne Maine, I got there as fast as I could (truth!). And in a very different way, those things are just as important to me as sheets or running shoes are.
     There’s a reason we don’t just throw sentimental items out, a reason we continue to pack and re-pack items of varying importance, but of great significance. A reason we print out pictures and stick them in various albums and frames. Because wherever you are, the things around you aren’t just objects, they are touchstones, reminders of who you are, who you were, and how you got that way.

Being back home

2011-08-11T14:47:00.002-07:00

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.

Photo blog!

2011-07-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

So I decided that since I'm now in America and can take advantage of all this high speed internet technology and what not to post some pictures of my time in Malawi. So the following is a collection of photographs, and their explanations. I hope. If I can figure out how to include photographs.

So this is a picture of the Peace Corps office in Lilongwe, the capital.

View of the airport runway. This isn't what most other African airports I've been to/through look like, Malawi is just small.

I remember the Jacaranda tree was pretty much the first thing we saw when we landed and I thought, "I've come to Dr. Suess land."

About a week after arriving we moved into a village. This is the one I was living in.

And this is my house. In front is my host mom for my first two months. She was pretty cool.

A view of my homestay village as seen from the top of a local mountain. It was always interesting to me to compare different places as seen from the air. Mozambique has just miles and miles of sheer uninterupted wilderness, Malawi is dirt houses and dirt roads, and South Africa is this incredibly mesh of countryside, farmland, small tin roofs, and suburban cul-de-sacs.

This is my village. I'm just not standing in front of any houses, but I assure you they actually are there.

This is my school. My primary project was to teach here, and I taught English Literature and Physical Science for three school years.

This is what a typical classroom looks like.

In addition to teaching I worked on a few secondary projects in Malawi. The largest-scale was Camp Sky, a two-week academic camp for outstanding students organized by the Malawi education volunteers.

My wildlife club sold school supplies donated by my home church to earn enough money to travel to the local national park where we saw these...

And these. (As well as Kudu, Water Buffalo, Impala, and LOTS of monkeys and baboons)

My sitemate and I also organized a one week camp in Nyika National Park (pictured left) for students in the north.

We taught them a series of Income Generating Activities (here, soapmaking) and the local villagers started coming to observe. Below are the girls with the beehive they built.

We also saw warthogs, the common duiker, bushbucks galore, impala, roan antelope, eland, zebra, hippos and elephants. For most of the students this was their first time seeing these animals. The photograph is a roan antelope.

It was probably the most fun time I had in my entire service.

Some random cultural things: these are the canoes they use on the lake. VERY difficult to balance in.

At night fishermen lash lamps to the backs of the canoes and paddle out to the middle of the lake to spend the night catching fish. When you look out to the horizon all you see are a bunch of glittering lights bobbing on the dark surface, like a reflection of the night sky.

The guli wam kulu are a group of dancers in the southern and central region. It's a secret society whose members cover themselves with pieces of cloths and masks and dance at traditional ceremonies such as the swearing in of chiefs.

The fact that a national insurance company uses this as a sticker is a pretty good indication of how prominent Christianity is in Malawi.

Baobab trees. They are huge. And old.

Oxcarts, they ain't fast, but they'll carry things around.

Graveyards in Malawi are always in a grove of trees. Unless you are burrying someone it's forbidden to enter them, and you can't cut down the trees. The central and southern regions would actually be far more deforested than they already are if not for this cultural norm.

In weddings in Malawi the little kids are dressed up just like a mini bride and groom. SO CUTE!

And of course you dance around and throw money into the air at the reception (the money is then collected and goes to the couple). It's a bit odd at first to just be throwing money around, but it helps them start their life, and it's kind of fun to be dancing in a confetti shower of money.

And then you auction off the cake.

The clothes market in Mzuzu is a square block of closed in stalls. In Lilongwe it's an open air market that you pay 10 kwacha to cross a VERY sketchy bridge to reach. The food market in Mzuzu is similar, but much more open, and pleasant, except for the fish part.

A clothing alternative is to just buy a long bolt of brightly colored died cloth (called a chitenje) and have the local tailor make you a dress, a skirt, or a shirt.

This is the president, Bingu Wa Mutharika, and his wife Calista. He had us over for lunch. It would be amazing if he could run the country as well as he could throw a party.

I found this in a monastery I visited one day. It's a quote from Matthew where Jesus says to the disciples, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." Although I am not particularly religious, it does happen to be my favorite bible verse. I think it's been a long time however, since I've thought of what I was doing in Malawi as anything besides just living a bit of a different life for a while, and getting to be with a community, new family, and new friends. (But for any conservative congresspeople who happen to be reading this, you will clearly note that Jesus is telling you to raise funding for the Peace Corps.)

Leaving Malawi

2011-06-17T08:12:00.001-07:00

Recipe: Nsima

This is the first thing I ever ate in Malawi. Nsima is the staple food in Malawi. It is said that you have not eaten unless you have eaten nsima. There are three different types of nsima, cassava (condowole), finely ground corn (nwoyera, all the nutrients are removed in this one pretty much) and ground corn (mgaiwa). In their cultural commentary under "what have I learned from my volunteer" my village put "we have learned that nsima is not the only food."

Take ufu (corn flour, or cassava flour) and have it set beside your fire in your winnowing basket (chihengo). Boil a giant pot of water. Once it is boiling, add the ufu handful by handful and stirr with the lukheza (giant stirring stick) almost constantly. Nsima is ready when it changes from a liquid to a viscous material you have to basically flip to stir. At this point spoon it out with a traditional large wooden spoon into food warmers. Eat with your favorite dende (side dish) by balling the nsima up in your hands and dipping it in the food. Careful not to burn yourself!

For as long as I was there, it still feels very weird to have completed my Peace Corps service, to have actually left. Partly this is because it still feels as though my arrival in Malawi, my training, my homestay, all occurred sometime last week, instead of a couple of years ago now. Part of it is also that there were times (more than I’d like to admit) where I would look ahead, and see the rest of my service as a stretch that was absolutely unending. Most of it, however, is that throughout the last few years I’ve made a home for myself in Malawi - made friends, become part of a family - and the idea that I’ve left all of that seems almost inconceivable.
One of the best parts about how I finished my service though, was that I got to stay in Malawi for a month after I was finished, and mom and dad came over again for a visit. Having my parents at my village goodbye ceremony, especially, was wonderful. The nursery school children performed traditional dances, the women sang special goodbye songs, and it was clear that everyone really appreciated my parents being there.
After leaving my village we took a second, more southern-centric tour of Malawi. We celebrated Dad’s birthday with a beach bar-b-que in a remote harbor, and even had a cake (I won’t say how many candles, but I will say that he blew them all out). We were threatened by a black mamba, and then sat in front of a pack of elephants at Liwonde National Park. And we went on a tea tasting tour at Satemwa. (Tea tasting is really interesting, in that apparently it is taken almost as seriously as wine tasting, with one having to slurp the tea to circulate air, and then spit it out. If you are me, and the tea is black though, you’ll just skip step two and head to step three, the spit out, ASAP.) After the parents left, I spent another week in Malawi, before flying back home.
It’s strange being gone from Malawi, especially at a time when so many things are changing for the country. The president has been less and less subtly moving towards trying to secure a third (and possibly eternal) term in office. He has been paying civil servants extremely sporadically for the past few months. My teachers all had a two month stretch where they simply were not paid, and it was right in the middle of “hunger season” (post harvest, pre-rains). Recently he informed police officers they would not be paid at all, and would have to raise their own salaries. Which they have been doing by inserting road blocks every five kilometers and fining as many cars as they can.
A few months ago he kicked the vice president, Joyce Banda, out of his party, and then cut her budget because he was afraid that on official trips she would begin campaigning for the 2014 presidency (well what did he expect?) More recently he kicked the British High Commissioner out when an e-mail referring to the Malawi government as “corrupt” leaked out (ummmm), since then Germany and Norway have also withdrawn aid.
There are many interpretations for why all this is going on. Some people think that the president is an alcoholic who is now also sliding into idiocy. Some people postulate that he’s just turning into the same old African despot we’ve seen in other iterations in other geographical locations, but some people actually think this is a highly strategical move to see if the Chinese will pick up some of the slack, and if Malawi can actually do without donors, thus leaving the President free from international pressures re: human rights and democracy issues specifically. Honestly I’ve been right in the heart of it, talking to people from all different stratas of society and a few different nations and I still have no clue.
Peace Corps itself is also going through a few changes. Whether it’s motivated by congress wanting to see results for funding, or by the pervasive feeling the Peace Corps is being overrun by post-college immature party kids, there is a huge push throughout Peace Corps to recruit more highly-specialized individuals. Which I’m all for. However, there has been a corresponding failure to find highly-specialized positions for such individuals, leading to some extreme disillusionment, boredom, and apathy on the part of said volunteers, which really doesn’t make for the most productive service.
Ever since I joined Peace Corps there seems to be a stronger and stronger push towards making Peace Corps a highly functioning development organization. As it stands now the three goals of Peace Corps are: 1) Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women. 2) Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served. 3) Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. If you’re looking at that, only one of those goals is actually about development.
In terms of my own service, I’m not sure how much concrete measurable development I did. What I am confident of is that I became part of a community, that I met, and lived with, people who will never forget me, and whom I will never forget. I am confident that I made big and significant differences in small ways, both to my school and for individuals throughout my community.
It seems to me that wanting Peace Corps to become a strictly development organization is redundant, it doesn’t concur with the original reasons Peace Corps was formed, and besides, America already has a fairly influential and substantial development organization. Peace Corps is the only existing on-the-ground community oriented organization in the world. So either one believes that striving to make small changes in the lives of individual people is a worthwhile goal, or you don’t. As for me, after almost three years of service, I am convinced that endeavor will remain the most worthwhile and the most rewarding of my life.