chicken in a bag

6.8.08

In my last entry, I mentioned that Brad and I rode through torrential downpour to get lunch one day last week. I would like to emphasize that getting soaked to the bone and wearing damp clothes for the rest of the afternoon hardly fazed us; we even welcomed feeling cold for a while. We get wet almost every day, or at least I do, but it tends to be because of the heat which leads to the production of disgustingly large quantities of sweat. Being cold and wet is so much better.

One of the sessions that we have each week during training is the community meeting and last week it was my turn to organize it, along with 3 other trainees. It was held out in one of the villages so that we all had a chance to see village (if you hadn’t already gone out to hang out or spend the night) and because the village people always bike into town for other sessions we have together with them. I thought it was kind of lame that we were offered a ride in the PC vehicles if we didn’t want to bike, and only about half of us did bike. If you have any doubts, I did in fact bike out there, but for those who didn’t I know that you will be doing your fair share of biking once in village so I have nothing against you.
The community meeting is a time when we receive general announcements from the directors of the different training programs as well as anyone who has something to tell the whole group. It is one of the rare times we all get together and exchange in a less formal way. We also “bitch” about whatever bothered us this week that has to do with just about anything related to pre-service training or life here in general. Of course we talk about the things that we enjoyed as well, and whoever’s in charge of the meeting that week also writes up a newsletter type document. It’s called the Haut Cinq which is a literal French translation of high five. It has contained information on near-arrests that trainees have escaped, poems, crossword puzzles, surveys of the trainees on certain topics, and this week we decided to make it a “news edition” and to make it like a real newspaper. We gathered all sorts of appropriate and bizarre news articles and I put it together.

After the meeting Brad Brian and I followed Jillian back to her families compound in one of the other villages because we were going to give pop rocks that Jillian got in the mail to the kids at her house. We figured it would be a highly amusing event for all parties involved, but everyone except her mom was still cultivating and hadn’t come home for “repos” (like a siesta). No worries, we got to see her place and meet her mom. Brian cruised home and the other three of us went into town for lunch at my new favorite restaurant. I pass through the marché first to pick up about 150cfa worth of tomatoes, green peppers and onions, 150cfa of fried ocean fish, and with that I go to “Chez Tanti” . It is a restaurant run by some sort of health association (I haven’t gotten the full story, only heard rumors which I had no problem believing) and they serve a couple of the regular dishes; usually riz gras, riz sauce, benga and macaroni. As a refresher in Burkinabé foods, riz gras is rice cooked in a tomato paste-based sauce. It reminds me of fried rice even though it isn’t cooked that way (probably all the Maggi - chicken stock cubes - they put in). It is quite plain but a step up from steamed white rice. Riz sauce is white rice with a sauce. The sauce is usually tomato paste and maybe some unbelievably overcooked vegetables that tend to become one with the sauce, as well as some peanut paste. S’alright. Benga is the bean dish. The beans are dark purple and it is usally mixed with a bit of rice. Its also alright but I have been somewhat conditioned to feel nauseous after having gotten sick the same days I ate it in the past. Macaroni is the tomato-paste based crappy tomato sauce on macaronis. Different from spaghetti in the the pasta is not long and straight but short curved tubes. You get the point? So I take my vegetables and my fish and I dice them into little bits and I mix it in with my riz gras to make a deliciously fresh tasting rice salad type thing. The rice dish only costs 150cfa at chez tanti which brings my grand total to 450cfa. I think these days that comes out to about $1 and a quarter or so. Elsewhere you can spend up to 500cfa on any of those dishes alone, forget the extra vegetables and meat, and you may get some overcooked vegetables (typically cabbage and onions) and maybe a couple bits of meat if you’re lucky. At ECLA, Mohammed makes the best spaghetti in town because its actually a Bolognese sauce, but it runs you 700cfa. I know that’s like $2 but if you can also eat for 450cfa, or even 200 cfa if you get a basic rice or pasta dish, it seems expensive.

Now that I have started down the food road I may as well continue writing about it before moving on to the other things I did last weekend. In fact, I am going to start a photo gallery of food dishes and items. They might not hold up to the beauty of McTasties or Applebee’s golden popcorn shrimp that you see on TV ads but at least you can see what we’re eating. So clearly, the 150 or 200 or even 500 cfa riz graz, riz sauce or bad spaghetti dishes are not going to cover your 5 food groups, let alone 3. You’ve got your carbs and your fats (they love to use vegetable oil) and if you’re lucky you have a small portion of your veges. I like to think that I am eating a bit healthier by creating my masterpiece for 450.

I only get bread and butter and tea for breakfast, which doesn’t do much for me, but some of the others get hard boiled eggs, omelets (I asked my family to stop making me these because they were too greasy, too oniony and too garlicy for 7am, and I also got really sick several days in a row when I ate them and can no longer even smell one of these omelets), milk, and sometimes these gateaux’s, fried dough balls, or galettes. The gateaux is a little muffin/bread/cake type pastry, the dough balls are… dough balls that are fried on the side of the road in huge woks over a charcoal or wood fire, and the galettes are made the same way. The galettes are made from beans and are like little blintzs. Its hard to describe how these all taste - they are tasty.

You might have noticed that you can buy a lot of things from the side of the street. In fact its usually a lot cheaper to buy food off the street than it is to get it in a restaurant, although you have to be wary of the hygiene factor. Nevertheless, there are lots of things you can buy on the street that are perfectly good to eat. I buy the fried fish a lot - it is fried daily and isn’t covered in flies (which is actually fantastic because so many things are, especially the mango in your hand that you’re trying to eat), the fruits mostly have skins that you don’t eat anyway, and the vegetables in the marché we soak in bleach water before eating. The fried breakfast foods, the fried potato wedges (kind of like fries) and whatever else they like to fry are all also OK. We have also been frequenting who we call the “benga lady at the corner” which is a small street side eating place where they cook benga in huge pots on wood fires. They make chick peas as well so we get half benga half chick peas, they throw on some diced onion and green pepper, some minced hot peppers, some fish oil if you want, and voila for 100cfa. It’s a great deal and it tastes good too. It’s also a source of protein which is something we are always looking for as meals here usually consist mainly of carbs. I failed to mention that Toe is a staple food, and can be made from several types of flour. In its simplest form it is steamed white corn flour that is mixed a lot to make a type of gelatinous pudding. It is eaten with several sauces that I can’t describe because they are made with ingredients I had never heard of before. Its also eaten with your hands. Just wait for the videos of that

I would also like to make the point that after 8 weeks in Africa, I have grown accustomed to and even to like a new assortment of foods. I actually like eating Toe, which others find ridiculous, although I have to admit that it is more the sauces that I like rather than the Toe itself. Toe has a very bland…flour…taste to it and just fills you up. Although Toe made with yellow corn flour reminds me of corn tortillas and I do actually like the Toe itself. You definitely can’t eat it alone so it is probably the sauces that I enjoy. I have also come to love snow peas. One of the dishes they make here is canned snow peas with a watery tomato onion sauce and it’s heavenly. That and half a loaf of freshly baked bread and I am very happy. Green beans are also making their appearance at the marché and I’ve had green beans twice now for dinner. They are prepared similarly to the snow peas, in a light tomato onion garlic and bay leaf sauce, sometimes with fish.

I think that’s it for my food rant, I will probably come back to the subject at a later date. Returning to the description of my weekend, after getting lunch, Jillian, Jenny and I went to the Jardin near my house to get a beer and chat. Jenny went to play volleyball with Brad and some others near ECLA and Jillian and I stayed until later in the afternoon at the Jardin. The “Jardin’s” here, which translate to gardens in English, are the local version of an outdoor bar. They are usually fenced in, or walled compounds with a main building that houses the refridgerators, beer, and maybe a sound system for bumping tunes, and then there are typically several “hangars”, which are covered sitting areas, around the enclosed area. The floor is dirt, small rocks or even grass during the rainy season and the hangars are usually on concrete slabs with either thatch or tin roofs. I really enjoy going there for drinks because they aren’t crowded, the one near my house is quiet, and there is lots of space around where you’re sitting. It’s like being in someone’s backyard with plastic lawn furniture. Jillian left to go home at some point and I did the same only to take a shower and leave again as we planned on getting chicken for dinner with a bunch of the other trainees. Getting chicken is relatively expensive compared to other meals, and can run up to 2000cfa. We don’t do it often and its quite the treat. The place we went does “chicken in a bag” . It is literally chicken cooked in a bag. The whole concept is a good idea, but the way they do it would probably lead to long term health problems if you ate it all the time. We didn’t care because we just wanted some tasty chicken, and eating it once won’t do much in my opinion. They take left over cement bags, which are like thick brown paper bags, and they wrap up a chicken with onions and garlic and they throw the whole package on a grill over a wood fire. They wet the bag so it doesn’t burn and then they let the chicken steam in the bag with the veges. When it comes out, its swimming in a pool of chicken grease and its steaming hot. It was pretty much one of the best things I have eaten here besides our 4th of July feast and the group cooking when we made French toast and banana bread. Check out the pics in Part 7. After our delicious chicken in a bag we went back to the Jardin and had a couple more beers before calling it an early night. Sunday was spent at the pool, per usual, after doing some laundry in the morning and eating lunch with the fam. Sundays are always great days cuz we get to relax to the max, not to mention how refreshing the pool is.

This week has been more model school, with yet more computer classes. I am happy to see the kids getting better, but inevitably run into new frustrating problems daily. The third section of my class, which comes in at the end of the week, seems to get the best lesson. By then I have worked out all the kinks after two other classes giving the same lesson. It’s good we get to try these things out in model school before we teach in a real lycée and also at site we will have enough time to give more attention to the kids who struggle with certain concepts. I can’t wait to start teaching kids who will have class with me for a whole year. Bringing them from not knowing how to move the mouse to being able to use all of the typical programs and navigating the internet is going to be such a huge achievement for them and will impress me every time.

Today I went out and bought my first pagne which means a sarong or sari. Here it is worn that way too, but it also refers to a pre-measured piece of fabric died with wax. They are the main ingredients for making clothes, whether they are button down shirts or African styles. I’m getting clothes made for Swear-In which is when we graduate from trainee to volunteer right before we move to our sites for good. There is a ceremony with Burkina officials and the American ambassador in Ouaga. My “outfit” is based on an African style shirt and pants. The pants are pretty basic, tailored, and the shirt is button-less, collarless, ¾ length sleeves with an embroidered V-neck. I also want to get the frontal mono-pocket and a hood put on, like a regular hooded sweatshirt. We’ll see how that works out.

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