It happens to everyone. Any prolonged period of time in a foreign environment is bound to kindle a strong desire for foods available only in the civilized, Western world. Bill Bryson, though only a week into his excursion to hike the Appalachian Trail, begins thinking longingly of any food that has never seen the inside of a bag, while his partner, a rotund man named Stephen Katz, opines strongly for anything of the Little Debbie family. African food, though filling, has done an excellent job of helping me to realize all of the excellent food I normally consume in large quantities back home. I wish I could say that the change in cuisine has helped me lose weight, but still evident by my belt shopping are the lingering effects of the “freshman fifteen,” or, in my case, the “first semester 25.” But I have found it quite possible to eat in equal proportions while still fueling the desire for Western food. I think the people that live with me have stopped using the word “cheese” in casual conversation, fearing the effect it will have on me: first comes the ethereal despondence, then the eyes start to glisten before I finally shake it off, realize where I am, and begin rattling off abstract statements like “I remember eating cheese” or “There are some great cheeses at this one place, I went there one time.”
The absence of good food, unfortunately, has this sort of affect over me that doesn’t fade but only strengthens with time. For example, the sentence “Golly, Brad, I sure wish that this pizza had real tomato sauce on it instead of this radioactive ketchup!” becomes “Why can’t these darn Ugandans make a proper pizza!” My venting target has always been the British, who colonized the world with their vast empire, and brought parliamentary government and terrible food to new subjects around the world. Ketchup is put on everything, including rice, people think herbs and spices are for people who don’t like bland food, fish generally comes either dried or fried, meet is cooked and cooked until a chainsaw and filed incisors are needed to consume it, and the bread resembles a rugby ball in several different ways. I thank my lucky stars that mayonnaise is expensive and hard to get, but I also become jealous of all those NGO workers who chose countries formerly colonized by the French. Rwandans, I have heard, enjoy a variety of excellent cheeses.
Oddly enough, foods that I don’t normally crave back in the United States have dominated my my dreams and wishes. Sushi, I always felt, was just a failsafe way to impress a date with your worldliness and refined palate. Yet, the more I eat steamed plantains and boiled vegetables covered with fake beef seasoning, the more I crave the Japanese delicacy, perhaps because it is so completely different from African food. Vietnamese soup, also, keeps me awake at night tossing and turning.
Unsurprisingly, it is the food from south of the order that I crave the most. Mexican food will be consumed in large quantities with my return to the United States. Slow roasted pork carnitas, fresh salsa, spicy barbecued beef, piping hot corn tortillas, all washed down with an ice cold glass of cinnamon accented horchata. I plan to drench my food with hot sauces of every variety, for Ugandans fear hot and spicy things. I may even try to find a Mexican girlfriend with a Mexican mother who loves to cook. If you have anyone in mind, I’d love an introduction, you’ll find me at the taco cart on Division Street.
That is how I feel about food right now. And for your own sake, don’t ask me about African beer…
Monday, May 17, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Black & White Photos
Photos taken during a recent auditing trip I made to our Lira program. Enjoy!
The group members trickling in before the start of their weekly training session
Winnie, our translator, studies the curriculum
Kelly and a young baby killing time before the session
A young boy sneaks a look at the mzungus over a wall
Betty teaching the group
My favorite photo. I'll let the readers caption this one.
Old woman learning new tricks
Building under construction, taken from my hotel room
Shot of the street leading away from the hotel
This isn't actually Lira, but an old picture from Tororo I had on my computer. Tororo Rock
Also not from Lira. Busiyiyi Falls
On the bus ride home from Lira
The same landscape but in color
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Rift Valley Railway (Part 2)
Before we boarded the train Ellen insisted we purchase a bottle of wine at a supermarket, though her cogency was unnecessary: this sort of thing I very rarely object to. So, giddy with anticipation, we tuk-tuked to the Mombasa train station and prepared to board the train. I enjoyed even the wait immensely. Rusting old train cars sat sporadically throughout a network of weedy tracks, ignored by everyone and everything save my camera lens. To the west, tracks pointed toward a setting equatorial sun. An old notice board, paint peeling and dirty, with departure times and passenger listings suggested a long lost popularity with rail travel or even an African administrator’s tendency to abandon organizational pedantry. We had some time to kill before the train left, so Ellen and I sat down on a bench outside and drank some water. A Kenyan man playing a guitar and singing soon made his way over to where we were sitting, and I offered him 100 shillings, which turned out to be one of the better decisions I had made in some time. Strumming on a guitar that outstripped the decrepit train cars littering the yard in age and wear, he belted out one of the greatest songs about Kilimanjaro I have ever had the pleasure to listen to. A few additional coins from our pockets and he brought out the big gun, a croony love song about two lovers who underappreciated each other. With his last note we boarded the train, and settled into our miniscule birth. I was hoping for mahogany paneling and a cabinet full of aged scotch, maybe even a chandelier, but was slightly disappointed. Our cabin was not the colonial relic I was hoping for, instead, that sickly orange paint only popular during the 1970s coated the walls and a miniscule sink area and cabinet offered, no, not liquor, but a drinking tap that didn’t work. Never mind, dinner was next on the docket; a promised three course meal with silver cutlery and china.
Dinner was quite an adventure. The train’s jostling seemed ill-suited for stemmed wineglasses, but we managed to finish off the whole bottle with only a little spillage. The cuisine was not spectacular, but the fact that we got three courses of mediocre food was enough to make me happy. Due to limited space in the restaurant car, we were obliged to sit with our fellow passengers. An elderly woman with a large splint on her forearm was directed to sit with me and Ellen at our table, but took one look at us and deemed us too young to engage in the type of sophisticated conversation she preferred. She eventually acquiesced, and joined us. We promptly offered her a glass of wine, which she refused, for she was on medication for her arm. Apparently an under-serviced matatu tire had spun lose from its axle and became airborne, hitting her in the wrist while she was in the village doing her PeaceCorps work. I can picture the scene in my head quite easily, actually, now that I have logged so many hours in public transportation in Africa. It is a rather funny image, I admit: the skinny, leathered American woman screaming in pain while the matatu driver and conductor simultaneously console her, apologize and repair the damage, and then offer her a free ride to the hospital in the newly fixed vehicle.
Breakfast was also rather sad, as far as the palate is concerned. Toasted Wonderbread with strawberry jelly and long-life margarine, two eggs in the limbo stage between over-easy and scrambled, and, the centerpiece, a lone two-inch piece of defrosted sausage. The views over breakfast, on the other hand, were excellent. Unlike in Uganda where every square meter of land along a road or pathway is lived on or cultivated, Kenya still contains sizeable stretches of unprotected, wild territory. Form the train’s streaked windows we saw ostriches, zebras, waterbuck, and about 700 varieties of antelope. While breakfasting we were fortunate enough to experience another colonial fixture that has persisted to the twenty-first century: the ancient white European with an extremely young and beautiful African wife. Recall Theroux’s comment about train passengers. The couple that joined us is everywhere in East Africa, from the beaches of Mombasa to the trendy cafes of Kampala, it even shows up faithfully at the swimming pool in Mbale every Sunday with its two children. The wife is always dressed to the nines -- after all, if you have managed to land a mzungu husband and become intimate with the Pound Sterling, you must alert everybody’s attention to your good fortune. The husband is always looking rather pale and wrinkled, which he likes to advertise by wearing very short shorts and rafting sandals, and carries with him a very amiable character and lots of high-powered sunscreen. The children, though not accompanying their parents on this particular train ride because they are attending a fancy boarding school, are both the wife’s from a previous engagement.
Almost exactly as scheduled, the train pulled into Nairobi Central Station around 8 am. The giant, aging steel wheels came to slow but quiet halt. Tall skyscrapers, claimed by the Kenyatta International Conference Center, Barclays Bank, the Hilton, DFCU, even the elevated gables of the State House rose upward from just beyond the station fences only a five minute walk away-- the train had brought us to the center of East Africa’s most important city. It seemed odd that such a lumbering, relic of colonialism still maintained such excellent real estate. Surely, in any other city, a fledgling railway, struggling even to repair the ceramic ceiling fans in its restaurant car, would have no place in such an environment. Yet, surprisingly, it appears as though Nairobi Central Station and the Rift Valley Railway are there to stay; a testament to British Imperialism, yes, but, I think at a more deeper level, a statement to remind people that travel for thirteen hours doesn’t have to be a terrible inconvenience, it can be an experience. Just sit back, drink a glass of wine or two, and enjoy.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Kenya photos
Fields of tea on Kampala-Nairobi Highway
Entertainment on board the Akamba Coach on the Nairobi-Kampala Highway? Why, Kenny Rogers, of course!
Just-arrived-in-Nairobi beers on top of our bed and breakfast.
Understandably, construction moves slowly in Africa, with a lot of deliberation. Notice how many guys there are on top of this building thinking things over
Nairobi skyline from our bed and breakfast
The same skyline
The Daily Nation building
Performers putting on a show for Africa-Middle East Microcredit Summit while the delegates await President Kibake and Queen Sophia of Spain, among others
Robert takes a breather during our safari in Mangelete
Passing out sodas to women who we interviewed to learn rural cooking methods in Mangelete
Robert and Phoebe posing by a couple of stoves on the research trip
Tylor couldn't make it to Erin's house and had to make a pit stop
The ladies, Erin, Ellen, and Rachel in Makindu
Makindu
The mosque in Makindu
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
The Lunatic Express (part 1 of 2)
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of going to Kenya for a microfinance conference at the Kenyatta International Conference Center in Nairobi. The trip also provided me with an opportunity to do something I had been dreaming about since I arrived in Uganda: ride a train in Africa. To be truthful, I had ridden once before the train running between Alexandria and Cairo, but the scenery wasn’t too spectacular, just perfectly flat Nile delta farmlands peppered occasionally by a rusting train carcass. Nor did it impress upon you a feelings of colonialism, the train was merely designed to take you from A to, in this case, C, and nothing more. The sub-Saharan lines are different, I was told. They are the ultimate colonial experience, I was assured, and the Mombasa-Nairobi line is no exception. I booked a ticket.
Train travel is also an exciting way to see a country. Paul Theroux, that tireless cynic and the most famous travel writer of the last thirty years, prefers the rail to all other forms. I tend to agree, it is easily the most relaxing way to move about. The course is set and so is the speed, with neither up to manipulation by the passenger, whose only task is to sit back, converse, sleep, eat, walk the compartments or just watch the country go by. To make it even more enjoyable, every railway trip is different. Northern Mexico’s Chihuahua train snakes through craggy peaks and over tall wooden bridges, with stomach-lurching drops on either side. In The Big Red Train Ride, a book about taking the Trans-Siberian Railway during the height of Soviet paranoia, British journalist Eric Newby tells of endless expanses of Siberian forest, broken occasionally by small stations seemingly miles from a phone line or cold beer. His photographer disembarks at every station and valiantly tries to photograph the Soviet peasant despite the near certainty that his roll of film will be confiscated by a policeman. Theroux provides an endless stream of extremely interesting characters described in his Great Railway Bazaar, including one man who proved so interesting that Theroux went looking for him years later back in Britain. Says Theroux, “I sought trains, I found passengers.”
I wanted to take this train because of what it stood for. I alluded to this in the first paragraph, and may have also in earlier posts, I have a guilty obsession of colonial relics here in Africa, and there is no more a physical fixture suggestive of colonial rule in East Africa than the railroad. Construction began at the tail end of the nineteenth century by the British, who wanted to link the port of Mombasa on the Kenyan coast with the commercial centers in the interior. Elsewhere in Africa rails were being built with the same intention. In the Belgian Congo tracks were laid from the port city of Boma to Leopoldville, two hundred miles up the Congo River, too riddled with cataracts to navigate by boat. Rubber and ivory would take three weeks to make the journey by porter, so the railway was constructed to shorten the harvest-to-bicycle tire process. East Africa’s RVR line was built with the same intention, ferrying goods (mainly coffee, tea and ivory) to port at a larger scale, and bringing inland heavy construction equipment. The ancestors of modern Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanzanians had no system of money at the time of the construction, and coercion was out of the question for the British “moral” colonialist, so labor was sought elsewhere. Asians from the Indian subcontinent were brought in in massive numbers. (The Asians kicked out by Amin in the early 1970s were the sons and daughters of those laborers.) The workers faced hard times on the job, but a big danger came also at night. Hundreds lost their lives to the maneaters. One particular stretch of track, the bridge built over the Tsavo River, is Hollywood famous. In 1898, Engineer Lieutenant John Patterson was hired to oversee the construction of the span, when his workers began disappearing in the night. Two mane-less male lions were dragging workers out of the tents and devouring them at an astonishing rate, crippling progress and frightening the workers into mutiny with thoughts of ghosts and devils. Patterson eventually killed both lions, but only after, according to the foreman, they had killed 135 workers in one year. The Ghost and the Darkness, that 1996 masterpiece with Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, is Hollywood’s poorly acted but nonetheless exciting take on the legend. In another legendary image, an Edwardian Teddy Roosevelt takes pot-shots at now-protected animals from a chair mounted to the front of the engine. In 1931 the railway was completed and the “Lunatic Express” made the 900 mile trip from Mombasa to Kampala . Lions or no lions, the British had to have their railway, and their empire. The feat is just as impressive today as it was at the turn of the century, as one African journalist writes “I was jarred out of this tragic amnesia by the sheer size of the 5930 Beyer-Garrat steam locomotive: Some 30 metres long and a quarter of a million kilogrammes in weight, the 5930 is a blunt, graceless dinosaur of the industrial age: Ugly yet charming, its driving wheels more than a metre in diameter, the body heavily riveted, fitted with giant water and coal tanks and an immense boiler, it is said to be one of the most powerful locomotives ever built. This was the concrete vehicle that brought the empire to us. Standing there, feeling slightly weak at the knees, I thought, “If you can build this behemoth, you can conquer the world…’”
In its heyday, the train took passengers from Mombasa to Kampala. However, many things in Africa are quickly reclaimed by the land if they do not receive a considerable amount of attention and upkeep. I am not sure when the last train passed from Kampala to Nairobi, but, gathering from the overgrowth of weeds and semi-permanent open -air markets covering the tracks on the Ugandan side, it was some time ago.
I had the perfect companion to accompany on my journey, an old friend from Portland. Ellen had grown up just a few doors down from me, and our families still see quite a bit of each other, though the same cannot be said for Ellen and me. Repelled by Southern California materialism and fast food chains, Ellen set off several years ago for the greener pastures of Montreal, where she has truly gone native. However, the stars have aligned here in East Africa: Ellen is currently working at a research station on the slopes of Mt. Kenya, and so we were able to get together while I was in Kenya. Ellen is great. She is very smart, a delight to talk to, well read, and has the admirable tendency to forget the fact that male friends become smellier with age and that sharing a miniscule, enclosed railway compartment with them for thirteen hours straight might not be the most comfortable thing in the world to do. We were both anxious and excited when our tuk-tuk pulled into Mombasa Train Station in plenty of time for our 7 pm departure.
Train travel is also an exciting way to see a country. Paul Theroux, that tireless cynic and the most famous travel writer of the last thirty years, prefers the rail to all other forms. I tend to agree, it is easily the most relaxing way to move about. The course is set and so is the speed, with neither up to manipulation by the passenger, whose only task is to sit back, converse, sleep, eat, walk the compartments or just watch the country go by. To make it even more enjoyable, every railway trip is different. Northern Mexico’s Chihuahua train snakes through craggy peaks and over tall wooden bridges, with stomach-lurching drops on either side. In The Big Red Train Ride, a book about taking the Trans-Siberian Railway during the height of Soviet paranoia, British journalist Eric Newby tells of endless expanses of Siberian forest, broken occasionally by small stations seemingly miles from a phone line or cold beer. His photographer disembarks at every station and valiantly tries to photograph the Soviet peasant despite the near certainty that his roll of film will be confiscated by a policeman. Theroux provides an endless stream of extremely interesting characters described in his Great Railway Bazaar, including one man who proved so interesting that Theroux went looking for him years later back in Britain. Says Theroux, “I sought trains, I found passengers.”
I wanted to take this train because of what it stood for. I alluded to this in the first paragraph, and may have also in earlier posts, I have a guilty obsession of colonial relics here in Africa, and there is no more a physical fixture suggestive of colonial rule in East Africa than the railroad. Construction began at the tail end of the nineteenth century by the British, who wanted to link the port of Mombasa on the Kenyan coast with the commercial centers in the interior. Elsewhere in Africa rails were being built with the same intention. In the Belgian Congo tracks were laid from the port city of Boma to Leopoldville, two hundred miles up the Congo River, too riddled with cataracts to navigate by boat. Rubber and ivory would take three weeks to make the journey by porter, so the railway was constructed to shorten the harvest-to-bicycle tire process. East Africa’s RVR line was built with the same intention, ferrying goods (mainly coffee, tea and ivory) to port at a larger scale, and bringing inland heavy construction equipment. The ancestors of modern Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanzanians had no system of money at the time of the construction, and coercion was out of the question for the British “moral” colonialist, so labor was sought elsewhere. Asians from the Indian subcontinent were brought in in massive numbers. (The Asians kicked out by Amin in the early 1970s were the sons and daughters of those laborers.) The workers faced hard times on the job, but a big danger came also at night. Hundreds lost their lives to the maneaters. One particular stretch of track, the bridge built over the Tsavo River, is Hollywood famous. In 1898, Engineer Lieutenant John Patterson was hired to oversee the construction of the span, when his workers began disappearing in the night. Two mane-less male lions were dragging workers out of the tents and devouring them at an astonishing rate, crippling progress and frightening the workers into mutiny with thoughts of ghosts and devils. Patterson eventually killed both lions, but only after, according to the foreman, they had killed 135 workers in one year. The Ghost and the Darkness, that 1996 masterpiece with Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, is Hollywood’s poorly acted but nonetheless exciting take on the legend. In another legendary image, an Edwardian Teddy Roosevelt takes pot-shots at now-protected animals from a chair mounted to the front of the engine. In 1931 the railway was completed and the “Lunatic Express” made the 900 mile trip from Mombasa to Kampala . Lions or no lions, the British had to have their railway, and their empire. The feat is just as impressive today as it was at the turn of the century, as one African journalist writes “I was jarred out of this tragic amnesia by the sheer size of the 5930 Beyer-Garrat steam locomotive: Some 30 metres long and a quarter of a million kilogrammes in weight, the 5930 is a blunt, graceless dinosaur of the industrial age: Ugly yet charming, its driving wheels more than a metre in diameter, the body heavily riveted, fitted with giant water and coal tanks and an immense boiler, it is said to be one of the most powerful locomotives ever built. This was the concrete vehicle that brought the empire to us. Standing there, feeling slightly weak at the knees, I thought, “If you can build this behemoth, you can conquer the world…’”
In its heyday, the train took passengers from Mombasa to Kampala. However, many things in Africa are quickly reclaimed by the land if they do not receive a considerable amount of attention and upkeep. I am not sure when the last train passed from Kampala to Nairobi, but, gathering from the overgrowth of weeds and semi-permanent open -air markets covering the tracks on the Ugandan side, it was some time ago.
I had the perfect companion to accompany on my journey, an old friend from Portland. Ellen had grown up just a few doors down from me, and our families still see quite a bit of each other, though the same cannot be said for Ellen and me. Repelled by Southern California materialism and fast food chains, Ellen set off several years ago for the greener pastures of Montreal, where she has truly gone native. However, the stars have aligned here in East Africa: Ellen is currently working at a research station on the slopes of Mt. Kenya, and so we were able to get together while I was in Kenya. Ellen is great. She is very smart, a delight to talk to, well read, and has the admirable tendency to forget the fact that male friends become smellier with age and that sharing a miniscule, enclosed railway compartment with them for thirteen hours straight might not be the most comfortable thing in the world to do. We were both anxious and excited when our tuk-tuk pulled into Mombasa Train Station in plenty of time for our 7 pm departure.
Monday, April 19, 2010
I guess this African Time thing is starting to get to me
I should begin by apologizing for my absence--I have been in Kenya amassing much fodder for the blogging cannon. Expect some posts to come about my trip.
I am sitting in an internet cafe in Nairobi at the moment, which has particularly sticky keyboards. This seems to be the norm here in Kenya, and I think it is kept this way to discourage political blogging,or perhaps locals just enjoy taking sugary drinks while they surf. I have found myself typing like I did in high school: two index fingers, hovered directly above the keyboard and perfectly straight, pressing with the ferocity of a concert pianist opening Beethoven's 5th. I think the people in the internet cafe are starting to wonder if I have some dexterity issues that require medication, so let me leave you for the time being. I shall return shortly with stories from Kenya, which include: arrests, stepping on freshly chewed gum on multiple occasions, buying the board of governors at a radio station lunch, and meeting a long lost neighbor from Portland.
I am sitting in an internet cafe in Nairobi at the moment, which has particularly sticky keyboards. This seems to be the norm here in Kenya, and I think it is kept this way to discourage political blogging,or perhaps locals just enjoy taking sugary drinks while they surf. I have found myself typing like I did in high school: two index fingers, hovered directly above the keyboard and perfectly straight, pressing with the ferocity of a concert pianist opening Beethoven's 5th. I think the people in the internet cafe are starting to wonder if I have some dexterity issues that require medication, so let me leave you for the time being. I shall return shortly with stories from Kenya, which include: arrests, stepping on freshly chewed gum on multiple occasions, buying the board of governors at a radio station lunch, and meeting a long lost neighbor from Portland.
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