Mom, as per your request- a picture of me with the kids in my concession. (I'm the white one! haha)
December 10, 2009
Water and Food
First of all, sorry. I had no idea it’s been so long since I’ve written! (hopefully the WiFi in Cotonou will be up and running Friday so that I can post this!) So here are some blog posts that have been stewing in my head for awhile. As far as recent developments, nothing much going on here except that it’s getting really hot, it so does not feel close to Christmas at all and my kids are having their first exams for my classes (*fingers crossed*). So here goes…
Waterlogged
Do you have any idea how much water you use? Really? I’m guessing not. I know that I only had a vague idea about an abstract number of gallons before I got here. But now I know (even if I know in kiloliters) I use over 200 kl a week! That’s around 100 gallons a week, just for drinking water, showering, washing dishes and washing my underwear. I don’t even do my laundry, I pay a girl to do it, so that number a lot bigger if I were to include that. I also don’t cart water all over (like from the well to my shower or from the pump to my kitchen), I pay the same girl to do that too. But even just seeing all that water carted through my house once a week is enough to make my head spin. (Side note- how strong are women’s necks here that they can cart 20 gallons of water on their head like it’s nothing?) So what do I do with my water? I cart it around some more. I don’t have running water, so I cart it from my back porch/shower area to do dishes and then I cart it back out again to dump it out. I usually dump the wash water in the concession because the chickens and the dog will usually eat the yukies and crumblies that are at the bottom. When I’m at the workstation in Cotonou, if I have some time (say while music and movies are downloading) I do the dishes there (not my dishes, you remember you communal kitchen in the college dorms? It’s like that) just for the joy of doing them with a sink. Yeah, I know, I’m weird. I also obsessively clean my house, so yeah. Can I just say for the record that I totally suck at washing my undies by hand? I can never seem to get the soap out so I end up doing 3 or 4 rinses.
Drinking water is a whole nother story. It originates from the pump (as opposed to the well, where my other water comes from). I don’t even know where the pump is, I should probably find it. Anyway, once it gets here and I pay for it, I filter it with the filter that my predecessor left me, then boil it in my biggest pot, then filter it into the filter that the Peace Corps gave me. Why filter it twice? There’s not really a need to filter the water twice (there are plenty of PCVs here that don’t filter or boil at all) I just do it because the filter that the PC gave me has a handy spigot at the bottom. It’s the stupidest thing in the world really. The doctors tell us to filter and then boil, but once you have gone through this process how are you supposed to get the water from the large pot to something you could actually drink out of, like a water bottle? So, I filter the second time so that I don’t have to dip my hand/water bottle into water that I just spent time and gas (we all have gas stoves) filtering and boiling. I do this everyday. Really, I drink that much water everyday (between 3 and 5 liters). I am also storing up some water for the day that I can’t go through this process but need water because I will inevitably get really sick at some point and not have the energy/patience/will/strength to get out of bed and make myself some water.
Cookery
Beninese food is great, in moderation. It’s full of hot peppers, gelatinous starches and sauces resembling both blood and snot. Yum! So I do most of my own cooking. I cook a lot of pasta. How I lost 30 pounds eating pasta and white bread at least once a day is up for scientific debate. I have no idea. I’m also sure that whoever invented Béchamel Sauce is bloody brilliant (and thanks Katrin for introducing me to it), you can add anything to it and make a pasta sauce. I will add anything to it: Taco Seasoning (so-so), Uncle Ben’s Ranch Dressing (good, but salty), a can of mushrooms (excellent), Herbes de Provence (also great). Beyond pasta I have made pan pizza, corn bread, chili, grilled cheese, and I plan on making more soon. I will say that it is a challenge to cook with just a 2 and a half burner gas stove, how I long for an oven! I mean, dutch ovens work great for baking, but are too small to make say, baked chicken, which all my former roommates and most of my friends know is one of my favorites. The other challenge is ingredients. I live in one of the best parts of Benin for produce and while I can get almost any type of fruit the only non-sweet produce I can get is onions, tomatoes, garlic and okra. See why I make a lot of pasta? I have also discovered that okra with vinaigrette dressing is pretty good. I can get other things, like avocado, green peppers and “jungle greens” if I can get to the market at 8 am, which is only possible on weekends, since 4 days a week I have class at that time. I really miss the American supermarket, where you can get anything that I would ever think of cooking. I also miss butter an inordinate amount. This is not helped by reading “Julie and Julia” at the moment, but the book is fun, how’s the movie? Anyway, I have a fridge at my house (which is pretty awesome) but when I try to get butter from Porto-Novo to here it always melts! (I love butter, just not melted all over the inside of my backpack) Cheese is also something I miss all the time. I eat about a wheel of Vache Qui Rit (Laughing Cow) a week, which (along with eggs) is my main source of protein. But Vache is just NOT cheese. You can get cheese here, but it’s pretty expensive, hard to get back to my house and always either Wagasi (an African cheese that’s pretty good, but doesn’t melt) or French, nothing wrong with that, except that my absolute favorite cheese is sharp Cheddar and there is absolutely none of that wandering around. Sometimes I even find myself craving Marie’s crazy good Norwegian brown cheese (mmm…creamy). There’s another thing I miss cooking with, cream, and milk. Or just drinking milk really, I do drink milk here but it’s of the powdered variety and although I do get separate sometimes and drink it straight, I mostly just cook with it and put it in my tea. Anyway I realize that talking about cooking has turned into complaining about things I don’t have here- but as an endnote I want to thank everyone who has sent me things (food things in particular), I’d be stuck with spaghetti every night if you didn’t!
Love and good eating,
Glenna
