Just A Bad Day, Not A Bad Life.

Melville’s Moby Dick begins with Ishmael declaring that when he’s grim about the mouth and feels like knocking people’s hats off, he takes to the sea.

I always loved the imagery of a disgruntled Ishmael just pissed and going away from the port, away from all the trouble that he had to deal with. He had someplace that was all his, or at least in his mind. He could escape from what was torturing him on shore and his release made for an escape from a situation that proved too much for him.

Landlocked in Africa, there is no sea, no place for me to take to, which means therefore, hats will be metaphorically flying.

There’s really no point in getting angry here. No one understands what I’m saying anyway. The point is moot. However, today was one of those days that starts with stepping in quicksand and ends with an anvil falling on your head.

Banking here is a disaster and after the third bank didn’t have power, I very rudely asked a teller if there was anything that worked in this country. His tired response, that was not at all offended even though it really should be, made me realize perhaps I wasn’t the only one sick of it here. Charging back through town, I literally almost pushed a bobo (little boy) into the gutter for referring to me as Opato (white girl). I get called Opato roughly 207 times every day, but this one in particular almost ended in violence. Throw in yelling viciously at okada drivers who shouted pointedly sexual epithets in my direction and the unknowing bystander might think that I had Tourette’s, not just a bad day.

I’m not sure how to make these days fewer with more time between them. Today was the worst in a long while and probably the first time I felt like being violent. No one could say that I was ever a patient person, or a particularly non-confrontational person, but I’ve never been someone to take my aggression out in a physical way. Perhaps there’s no more room inside my body anymore and it’s just coming out my extremities. Perhaps this is why flogging is such an issue here. Maybe if you had to be raised in this country, your anger would build to a point where beating kids with sticks was the only way to get it out.

I’m not sure if this is a welcome change from constantly bursting into tears. The fact that those seem to be my only two options makes me wonder how Peace Corps ET(early termination) rate is only about 35%. I would think feeling this many things at once would make people too insane to even continue service.

I just have to keep telling myself that it’s just a bad day, not a bad life. But when the day to day starts to get repetitive, you begin to wonder how much day to day strung together begins to form your life. And are you living the way you want to? What can you live with?

How much can one person really do?

Provocative Plasas

So, in the States, everything was about sex. The ads, the propaganda, and almost every girls night out ended there. Somehow, it was a universal topic. I could talk about it with my friends, my teachers, even my parents, although I know that last one is pretty unusual. My parents are pretty much the coolest people you’ll ever meet.

Anyway, when I first met the other volunteers I was serving with, we were living it up our last night in Philly. Drink after drink, raucous conversations, and of course, talks about sex. It’s human nature and something that a bunch of 20-somethings can all talk about.

Now, 4 months later, infinitely closer to all the people I came with, sex still comes up on occasion. But there’s a new kid in town, something that we talk about with much more regularity, passion or longing.

Food.

There are many things to like about this country, but the food is really not one of them. At least not for me. Some people really dig the plasas (what the Sierra Leoneans call the part of the meal on top of rice) that we eat here, and are cool with eating kukuri (cookery) food every night, which generally consists of enough rice for ten, cassada leaf and enough palm oil to drown you. Not I. I find my only child syndrome manifesting in odd ways here. I was never forced to eat what I didn’t want to, so when I’m being force fed cassada, I almost rudely turn it down.

Sierra Leoneans are a very simple people. They don’t mind eating one of 4 revolving dishes that they make here every day. I’ve never once heard a child go, “Aw mom, cassada again??” They just eat it and shut up, like my mom used to tell me all the time.

The main stars of Salone cuisine are: Cassada Leaf, Granat soup, Petete leaf, and Acheke.

Cassada is the big kahuna. Everyone eats cassada, pretty much every day. The cassada root looks sort of like a potato, but has a totally different flavor. I’ve only had the root a few times, mainly when I would get sick during training and my host family would proclaim that eating the root would make me better. That was pretty much the only time they would force feed me anything, determined to make me ‘better’. The cassada leaf is a fibrous leaf, which they take off the stem, beat the ever living hell out of until it’s practically mush, and then boil it with beans or dried fish and serve it family style with rice. Cassada is the missionary position of food here. The go-to, the staple, always a classic.

Granat Soup translated is pretty much peanut butter soup, which is actually less gross than it sounds. Sierra Leoneans will take the peanuts and grind them until they’re a really runny kind of peanut butter. They’ll put a few packets of this into the soup with palm oil, the red monster that when consumed in excess, will turn the sensitive skin of the white man orange. They’ll sometimes add other things, like onions or beans and usually a dried fish or two. As far as options go, this is probably the best in my opinion. Granat soup is the crowd pleaser, the doggie style of the plasas world if you will.

Petete leaf is served basically the same as cassada, except you don’t need to beat the hell out of it like cassada. You mainly just chop it up and boil it with the fish and beans or whatever else you want in it. It’s a little slimy going down, but the flavor is a nice change from the slightly charred taste that cassada is always sporting. Petete is a nice change from cassada, but not too far from what you know, with it still being a green plasa. Kind of like shower sex.

And then there’s acheke. My disclaimer for acheke is this: after you’ve been force fed weird and excessive amounts of African food, you just want things that are familiar, even if they have no business being served together. Acheke starts with a foundation of gari, which is fermented cassada root. Then goes a heap of macaroni, and if you’re at a really classy acheke place, maybe some vegetables. But usually just onion, because they’re easy to find and cheap. Then they’ll slice and egg on top of that and put on either fish or chicken. They top it off with a gravy that is mostly palm wine and hot peppers, then a dollop of mayonnaise and a healthy squirt of ketchup. Mix it all together and it smells and looks like vomit, but sustains many of the volunteers that are here. Acheke is like the weird foreign position that Cosmo featured, one that seems like a good idea in theory, but you can never quite figure out how to do it like the magazine says. But it feels okay anyway.

If you’re abstaining like me, then you leave all plasas alone. I ate them for the ten weeks of training and then decided that was enough. I mostly eat boiled peanuts here, which I really think the states should pick up. It really is the best way to eat a peanut. For now, this is okay. But I’m also about 55 pounds lighter than I was when I came here, so I’m not sure how much longer peanuts will cut it.

My fellow PCVs are the loves of my life and in so many ways no one in America can really understand many aspects of our friendships. And one of the oddest things to an American might be how frequently we talk about food. But think about how many times you mentioned sex today. When you’re as hungry as we are, food is at the forefront of your thoughts.

I don’t think I’ll be opening a Salone-style restaurant upon my return to civilization.