Vacation Pictures: Heidi, Jenni, Kelly

Crossing Alborz

By Heidi Noroozy

Crossing Iran’s Alborz Mountains on the Chalous Road from Tehran to the Caspian Sea is sometimes breathtaking, often hair-raising, and always an adventure. The road twists in a multitude of hairpin turns, and I hold my breath as we scrape past rough rocky walls, swerve around oncoming cars that straddle the lanes, and seem about to plunge into endlessly deep ravines. The road runs through a multicolored landscape—gray and red rock on the Tehran side, white-capped peaks at the summit, and green valleys on the descent to the land-locked sea. Early in the journey, we pass the Karaj Dam with its lake of blue-green water. A village on the far shore, cradled by rocky cliffs, is accessible only by boat. Higher up, the road tunnels through the mountain, and avalanche shelters protect it from bits of broken glacier. Villages, farms, and restaurants crop up in places that seem too bleak to support human life. Roadside shops sell everything from cigarettes to yogurt strained through huge white cloth bags that dangle from the eaves. I always keep an eye peeled for the haft sheytoon (seven devils), cone-shaped rock formations that line the road. There are only five devils now, since two of them broke off and fell into the valley below, victims of an earthquake or the wrath of God, depending on who’s telling the tale. When I spot the deep blue expanse of the Caspian Sea peaking through the trees, I feel my muscles relax. Once again, I’ve survived the perilous journey across the Alborz Range.

Oregon Coast

By Jenni Gate

On home leave from Africa or Asia every couple of years, we traveled the U.S., visiting every relative my parents could think of. My earliest memories of the Oregon Coast are from one of these trips, when I was about 7 years old. We traveled from seeing family in Oregon down the Oregon Coast, through the Redwoods in Northern California and into central California to see more relatives. I don’t remember much about the family we visited, but the Oregon Coast made a deep impression. In California, the beaches were warm and inviting, but in Oregon they are wild. The rocks rising from the waters off the coast create a raw, stormy beauty matched by few other places. Its treacherous, rugged coastline inspires artists and photographers the world over. In college, I visited the Oregon Coast and fell in love all over again. When my son was about 3, we traveled with my parents to Brookings, and it was a joy to see my son experience the surf and sand for the first time. Now it is still my favorite place on the planet, one I have the opportunity to visit occasionally. Whether during a violent winter storm or a sun-kissed summer day, my favorite memories are of contemplating the vast ocean and hiking the cliff trails, sand dunes, and beaches of the Oregon Coast.

For more of my tales, please check my blog at Nomad Trails and Tales and like my page on Facebook. You can also follow me on Pinterest.

Snowy Mountains, Tripping Stream

By Kelly Raftery

This picture always garners the question, “Where in Kyrgyzstan was this taken?” It always reminds me why we chose Colorado as our home. Colorado, we are proud to call you home, for all that you are that reminds us of Kyrgyzstan, for all the opportunities you have given us. This photo was from a trip we took two years ago, just after my husband landed the job that brought us to the Front Range.

I remember this warm, sunny day, stopping alongside the road, walking in a mountain meadow and watching the stream rush by, washing our hands in the ice cold water. After three years of trying to escape Las Vegas’s severe economic downturn, we would be in our new home by the end of the month.

This photo marks a week when our lives took a new direction. Once in Colorado, my son was able to take dance lessons (he is now competing on the national level), my husband was able to find a challenging and fulfilling job and I was able to find time to pursue my passion for writing.

Those snowy mountains, that tripping stream, thank you for leading us home.

Layers of Identity

By Jenni Gate

“Middle child syndrome just doesn’t exist!” How many times I heard this as I was growing up. But I was convinced that birth order meant everything to personality. I was the verbal one, the mouthpiece for my older and younger sisters. I was the one who stood up to our parents when I thought life was unfair, stood up with an attitude. I was the outgoing sister who went out and introduced myself to the neighborhood every time we moved, then brought back playmates for my shy sisters. I was self-reliant, stubborn, moody, and introspective. My parents said I was “complicated.”

My epiphany came on the day of my grandmother’s funeral. We went back to her house and walked through it together. The emotion built in all of us. Mom put her arm around Trina’s shoulder and pulled her close. Dad reached over to Susie and hugged her tightly. I stood in the middle of the room, tears stinging my eyes, feeling profoundly alone. As I stormed out of the house, my dad tried to reach out to me. I brushed him away, thinking, “This is it, the one, single moment that sums up my life.”

It took me a while, but I finally realized being in the middle means being self-reliant, independent, and self-satisfying. My parents and my sisters love me, but being in the middle means being alone and on the outside more often than it means being surrounded. It means mediating with others to keep the peace. It means looking up to the sister ahead of me while pulling along the one behind. It means standing on the sidelines and looking in at the way others interact.

As a child being uprooted every few years and moved to another country, being self-reliant, independent, and resilient became a survival skill. Resilience is a Third Culture Kid (TCK) trait. Adaptability, the ability to blend in even when we don’t fit in, is another. And it could be said that the sense of being on the outside looking in defines much of the TCK experience.

What is a TCK? A TCK is someone who spends a significant period of time (more than a two-week vacation) outside of their parents’ home culture. Not fully fitting into the host culture, the family seeks out others who are also not from their home cultures. These friendships form the third culture. As we adapt to different cultures, we absorb much of our host culture; out of necessity, we grow close bonds within the culture of our immediate family; and we identify most closely with others of our third culture. We build relationships within all the cultures we interact with, but never have full ownership or belonging in any.

After finishing high school in Pakistan, I returned to the US for college. That year, I suffered the most intense culture shock of my life. I had an identity crisis.

Returning to my passport country, the U.S.A., meant coming “home” to a place I barely knew or understood. My senior year of high school, I got caught in the first Russian-backed coup in Afghanistan. It was bloody and violent, and I was well on the way to squishing the experience down into a little box and crushing it deep, deep inside. Coming home to the U.S. that summer, fireworks on the 4^th of July freaked me out. Search light-type displays lighting up a night sky to advertise a new car dealership struck an irrational fear deep in the pit of my stomach.

I began my first year of college with mixed feelings, but mostly excitement to begin my life as an adult. I wanted to learn everything, try everything, experience everything my home culture had to offer. My new home was in the dorms of a Pacific Northwest campus set in a lush, beautifully manicured lawns and gardens in the middle of a rain forest. The contrast could not have been more exquisite. When I left Pakistan, the dust was rising off the desert plains and the monsoons would not start for several months yet. The Himalayas, always covered with snow, rose starkly from the dry plains below.

In Pakistan, the average annual income per family at the time was $100. At my college, although a percentage of the students were on financial aid, many came from wealthy families. Some of those flaunted sports cars, designer dresses, flashy jewelry.

A bigger difference was in traffic. In Pakistan, all of humanity and half of the animal kingdom share the roads: overloaded buses with people hanging onto the sides and goats and chickens on top, crowded taxis, motorcycles, bicycles, water buffalo and horses pulling carts, men pushing wagons, and people walking. At college, my friends would load three or four of us in a car and zip down a highway. I felt an overwhelming sense of separateness from people in other vehicles, a sensation that we were cocooned from others in our own separate environment as we weaved in and out of traffic. It was intense cognitive dissonance.

Carpet vendors, Islamabad
Photo by E.L. Headrick

But the biggest shock was at the grocery store. In Pakistan, we shopped a lot at the local outdoor and covered markets. We bought from vendors with small stalls crowded with beautiful displays of fruit, nuts, and vegetables. We bargained for every purchase, enjoying the interactions with shopkeepers and sense of pride when we knew we struck the right price. Special finds on the black market were prized. We understood the value of items that made their way across the desert on the back of a camel or smuggled across borders. I valued hand-made items, knowing the life of toil, uncertainty, and strife that went into their creation. Indian ragas blared from tiny transistor radios in each stall. Shopkeepers called to us by name and invited us to join them for tea, and we sat and sipped and admired the produce, making our decisions at leisure. About once a month, we shopped at the PX (post exchange) for items like toothpaste, toilet paper, shampoo, and alcohol. It was a small shop and only carried one or two brands of anything.

The first time I shopped with friends at college, I was paralyzed by over-stimulation. My friends lost patience with me as I stared at aisle after aisle of hundreds of choices, wondering how anyone ever made up their minds which one to pick. Endless choices of toilet paper—could there really be any difference? The aisles stacked high with factory manufactured goods were intimidating and impersonal. At the checkout stand, our items were rung up on a cash register. There was no bargaining, no casual talk while we verbally danced around the price of an item; just a "how are you today?" to which the cashier did not want an answer, a total amount due, and a "have a nice day" as we walked toward the door. I felt no satisfaction at the exchange.

It was not until I started college that I began to realize how unique my upbringing was. Rather than fitting in with my “home” culture, I was once again an outsider looking in. I’ve lived in the U.S. now, off and on, for my adulthood, and I’ve continued my nomadic, self-reliant ways. I know change, I know loss, and I know the excitement of new places. Overriding all of that, I know I am forever the outsider looking in.

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TCKs learn to say goodbyes early and often. Some of us come to hate them, knowing we may never see our closest friend of the last few years or months again. Often, it is easier to argue than to accept the next loss. Infrequently, someone I have said goodbye to reappeared later in my life. To deal with the difficulty of goodbyes, I keep in mind how changeable life is. I prefer to wish us happy travels, until we meet again.

If you would like to read more about my travels or life as a global nomad, please visit my blog, Nomad Trails and Tales.

The Sweetest Melons: Memories of the Congo

Photo by Aravind Sivaraj CCx2.0

By Jenni Gate

We drove down the hill from our home through the city of Kinshasa. Just outside the city, the jungle was thick. The road was full of pot holes and ruts. Our car bounced along on the rough pavement, heading towards vast stretches of farm land. About 8 miles from Kinshasa, we turned off the road into an open area with several low, concrete-block buildings spread out around a farming compound. Rice paddies stretched into the distance, surrounded by jungle. It was the summer of 1970, and we had arrived at the Chinese Agricultural Research Center. 

The circumstances of our visit were this: Dad, an agriculturist, was working with a Taiwanese agricultural mission in coordination with U.S. efforts to develop rice varieties to help ease the food shortages in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). But they had a problem—the Congolese people would not plant or eat the rice in production from the Chinese Agricultural Research Center. Dad commented to his Chinese counterparts that he couldn’t understand why the Congolese rejected the rice, because all rice tastes the same. The Taiwanese were shocked. The Head of Station invited all Americans and their families out to the farm to taste the different varieties being developed.

Oryza sativa

My sisters and I jumped out of the car, eager to stretch and explore. A group of Taiwanese and Chinese men came to greet us, smiling and nodding at each of us. I don’t remember their names after so many years. They were dressed in tan, gray or black slacks with white, button-down shirts, and polished leather shoes. A few of them wore tightly woven straw hats. A couple of the men gestured at their young sons to come and meet us, and we were soon running and playing tag on lush, green grass in front of the Center.

We toured the farm, learning that the land for the project was provided by Mobutu. There were papaya and mango trees, citrus trees, bananas, and coconuts dotting the landscape near the driveway. Surrounding the homes and research buildings were the rice paddies, each marked with signs bearing numbers representing the variety being produced. The plants looked like long grass in the water, with some that grew as high as 5-ft. tall. Most of the rice was about 3-ft. tall.

Photo: IRRI CCx2.0

We were led through Quonset huts where we saw rice and other vegetable and fruit seedlings in nurseries. In broken English and French, but with great pride, our hosts showed us a large variety of rice seedlings. There were several varieties each of long, medium, and short grain rice plants.

In one Quonset hut, we saw many melons, from honeydew to watermelon. At the time, all watermelons had seeds, so we were impressed when we discovered that the Chinese Agricultural Research Center had developed seedless melons. The seeds inside the melons were miniscule, which  was great news to me. Dad had always told me the big, black seeds that I accidentally swallowed every time we ate watermelon were going to sprout inside my stomach and grow. I didn’t really believe him but, then again, I had no desire to find out.

Seedless by Scott Ehardt CCx2.0

At dusk, the Taiwanese brought us indoors for dinner. We ate a gigantic steamed fish and a dish called Lion’s Head Stew, which was ground meat cooked in a rice-pasta pouch. It was so delicious that I’ve searched for Lion’s Head Stew on the menu at every Chinese restaurant I’ve been to since then, including when I visited Hong Kong years later. I’m still searching, without success. Our hosts had us sample several rice dishes of different varieties of rice. We sampled white, creamy, and brown rice in every shade imaginable. Some rice was white and sticky and tasted like the rice we were used to eating. Some of the rice was almost sweet. A lot of it tasted like cardboard. This was the reason the Congolese would not plant and eat the rice produced by the Center. The rice available in sufficient quantities for use by local farmers had no flavor. But there were many varieties still being developed. When we tasted one variety of rice with a clean, nutty flavor, Dad said, “I want 100 kilos of that.” Our hosts exclaimed that it was their favorite as well.

Red, White, Brown & Wild Rice by Earth100 CCx2.0

For me and my sisters, the best part of the meal was dessert. Iced platters, bearing slices of cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon, and yellow-flesh watermelon, all garnished with curlicue shavings from the rinds, were brought out and passed around. The novelty of melons without seeds kept us awestruck.

It was summer in Africa, and those melons were sweet and refreshing.

Photo by Kelly-Wikimedia CCx2.0

That summer treat, exploring all the flavors of rice and melon, has stayed in our family memory for decades. I still love melons, especially honeydew, and the memory of those flavors on that hot summer day still outshines the mundane, commercial flavors of the rice and melons we eat in the States today.

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As a side note: Years later, Dad took a flight from Jakarta to Hong Kong. He sat next to a young, Chinese man who had been to Jakarta to buy rattan. As they sat talking, the young man mentioned he had been to Zaire. In a flash of recognition, Dad said, “I remember you! You were at the Research Center.” The young man remembered my dad bringing him with us to the Embassy swimming pool on occasion. They exchanged contact information, both commenting on what a small world it is. Indeed, it is.

Myra, Turkey

By Jenni Gate

A destination spot for travelers in the ancient world, Myra was part of the Lycian empire along the Turquoise Coast. It had a long history as part of the ancient Greek and Roman empires with a port important to trade throughout the Mediterranean. Myra is rumored to have been the birth place of St. Nicholas in the 4th century AD (the Byzantine era). In Biblical times, St. Paul is said to have changed ships in the harbor. Great travelers throughout time have marveled at the cliffs housing the necropolis, and its amphitheater was one of the largest of the Lycian empire.

Cliffside necropolis at Myra, Turkey

Amphitheater at Myra, Turkey

Great Travelers in History: Mary Kingsley

1862-1900

By Jenni Gate

The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.

Albert Einstein

Mary Henrietta Kingsley traveled paths few in history had ever explored in a time when women never traveled alone. Her journeys within West Africa expanded Europe’s knowledge of the region. Despite the inherent racism of colonialist England during the Victorian era, she became an advocate for the people of West Africa, often suffering ridicule as a result. Ignoring popular opinion and the expectations of society, Mary Kingsley paddled up little-known estuaries, walked through jungles, endured insects and reptiles, climbed mountains, and stoked fires on steamships. She met and befriended cannibals and missionaries alike, though it would be fair to say she preferred the former to the latter. She collected specimens of fish wherever she went, and took copious notes of her experiences. Her life was extraordinary but short.

Although she had no formal education, Mary Kingsley grew up in a house full of books about science and memoirs of explorers. Her father, a doctor and writer, traveled extensively throughout his own life. He contracted rheumatic fever on his last journey and returned home where his daughter cared for him until his death. She had nursed her mother for years. Coincidentally, both parents died within a few weeks of one another. Mary Kingsley, then age 30, decided to travel. She had a few academic connections through her brother, who was in law school at that time. Mary read what was known about Africa, asked her acquaintances for advice about traveling there and was roundly told not to go. She was repeatedly warned that it was too dangerous to go to West Africa.

Ignoring all advice, in 1893 she headed to Liverpool and boarded a ship for the Canary Islands, then pushed on to Sierra Leone. She arrived in West Africa with few possessions other than her high-necked shirts and floor-length skirts. Traveling the coastline by steamboat, she made her way past the oil rivers of Nigeria and on to Angola. 

Region traveled by Kingsley

It was the Victorian era, and women did not travel alone. Her shipmates assumed she was a missionary, and they were scandalized to find her still on board the ship after all the other missionaries disembarked at the Canary Islands. Even in Africa, local women continually asked where her husband was. She frequently went into dangerous areas alone, but most often journeyed with African men who helped her by cooking, translating, making camp, and finding pathways.

On her second journey to West Africa a year after the first, Kingsley traversed the rivers of the French Congo and climbed Mount Cameroon (the first English person to climb it). She met and befriended the Fan (or Fang as some sources name them) people, who were known to be cannibals. Exploring by steamboat and dugout canoe, paddling the swamps and streams of the Ogooué River in Gabon, she collected fish from the rivers and lakes to take back to the British Museum as specimens for study. She was thrilled to have this work taken seriously by the zoologist who helped sponsor the trip, Dr. Albert Gunther. At least three previously unknown species of fish were named after her.

Mary Kingsley documented travels on the rivers throughout West Africa. Her writing is evidence of a humorous and curious mind. In Travels in West Africa, she described the dangers of paddling through the tidewaters of African rivers in dugout canoes:

Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small dugout canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake – a thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming along – and when he has got his foot upon his native heath – that is to say, his tail within holding reach of his native mud – he is highly interesting, and you may not be able to write home about him – and you get frightened on your own behalf.

About encounters with insects in West African Studies, she wrote:

But it’s against the insects ashore that you have to be specially warned. During my first few weeks of Africa, I took a general natural historical interest in them with enthusiasm as of natural history, it soon became a mere sporting one, though equally enthusiastic at first. Afterwards a nearly complete indifference set in, unless some wretch aroused a vengeful spirit in me by stinging or biting. I should say, looking back calmly upon the matter, that 75 per cent of West African insects sting, 5 per cent bite, and the rest are either permanently or temporarily parasitic on the human race. And undoubtedly one of the many worst things you can do in West Africa is to take any notice of an insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxas on a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it will go away – for that’s your best chance; you have none in a stand-up fight with a good thorough-going African insect. …

Of course you cannot ignore driver ants, they won’t go away, but the same principle reversed is best for them, namely, your going away yourself. 

And later in the same work:

While in West Africa you should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers. You can start doing it as soon as you land, which will postpone the catastrophe, not avoid it; …it may be just as well for you to let things slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a column of the wretches up your legs. … The females and workers of these ants are provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for all they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically up to the hilt; they remain therein, keeping up irritation when you have hastily torn their owner off in response to a sensation that is like that of red hot pinchers.

After her second trip to West Africa, Kingsley toured England and spoke widely of her travels. She lectured on diverse topics from opening trade to Europeans in the region to the harm caused by missionaries converting native people and destroying whole ways of life in the process. Her opinions, formed from personal experience and observation, were controversial, sometimes creating a backlash in the press. Yet her work was influential in establishing perceptions of West Africa in Europe, and many of her observations are still relevant.

Volunteering as a nurse for the Second Boer War, Mary Kingsley returned to Capetown, South Africa in the late 1890s where she died of typhoid on June 3, 1900. In England between journeys, she had met Rudyard Kipling, striking up a friendship of mutual respect and admiration. In her work, Kingsley often quoted Kipling. At her death, Kipling gave her eulogy before her burial at sea with full military honors.

About her own writing, Mary Kingsley was humble and humorously self-deprecating, as the following story illustrates:

Alas! I am hampered with bad method of expression. I cannot show you anything clearly and neatly. I have to show you a series of pictures of things, and hope you will get from those pictures the impression which is the truth. I dare not set myself up to tell you the truth. … It is a repetition of the difficulty a friend of mine and myself had over a steam launch called the Dragon Fly, whose internal health was chronically poor, and subject to bad attacks. Well, one afternoon, he and I had to take her out to the home-going steamer, and she had suffered that afternoon in the engines, and when she suffered anywhere she let you know it. We did what we could for her, in the interests of humanity and ourselves; we gave her lots of oil, and fed her with delicately-chopped wood; but all to but little avail. So both our tempers being strained when we got to the steamer, we told her what the other one of us had been saying about the Dragon Fly. The purser of the steamer thereon said “that people who said things like those about a poor inanimate steam launch were fools with a flaming hot future, and lost souls entirely.” We realised that our observations had been imperfect; and so, being ever desirous of improving ourselves, we offered to put the purser on shore in the Dragon Fly. We knew she was feeling still much the same, and we wanted to know what he would say when jets of superheated steam played on him. He came, and they did; and when they did, you know, he said things I cannot repeat. Nevertheless, things of the nature of our own remarks, but so much finer of the kind, that we regarded him with awe when he was returning thanks to the “poor inanimate steam launch”; but it was when it came to his going ashore, gladly to leave us and her, that we found out what that man could say; and we morally fainted at his remarks made on discovering that he had been sitting in a pool of smutty oil, which she had insidiously treated him to, in order to take some of the stuffing out of him about the superior snow-whiteness of his trousers. Well, that purser went off the scene in a blue flame; and I said to my companion, “Sir, we cannot say things like that.” “Right you are, Miss Kingsley,” he said sadly; “you and I are only fit for Sunday school entertainments.”

Mary Kingsley wrote two books, Travels in West Africa, published in 1897, and West African Studies, published in 1899, and she published several articles. Her writing was descriptive and full of detail about the surroundings and observations of the people she encountered. The humor infusing her writing makes reading her work still a joy today.

Off The Beaten Track: Mesa Verde

By Jenni Gate

Cliff Palace - one of the largest dwellings in Mesa Verde

Tower in Cliff Palace

These days, Mesa Verde National Park is not too far off the beaten path. It has a rich and mysterious history, a setting high on the mesa cliffs of southwest Colorado with deep canyons and expansive vistas. The Anasazi (ancestral Puebloans) lived on top of the mesas about 2,000 years ago, farming the fertile soils at about 7,000 to 8,000 feet in altitude. The area was most likely settled around 400 AD. By around 1100 AD, resources on the mesa tops were being depleted, and a lengthy drought forced people to the cliffs where water seeped through the sandstone until it hit bedrock, pooling and seeping into springs within caverns. The Anasazi built homes, towers, and kiva structures right in the arched caverns that were cut into the cliff face by erosion. They only lived in these cliff dwellings for about 200 years, and then they disappeared. Modern Puebloan people believe the Anasazi are their ancestors, that the drought drove these ancient people from the mesa and into more fertile parts of the Southwest.

Painting inside Cliff Palace 2-story dwelling

The Anasazi kept dogs and domesticated turkeys. They farmed corn, beans, and squash. The mesa forests provided pinyon and juniper trees.  Various berries were abundant. They traded with other Southwest people for cotton, and they developed unique pottery designs.

Some of the dwellings are decorated with paintings on the walls and hand prints. One of the popular hikes in the park meanders along a boulder=strewn cliff path to a wall of petroglyphs. The petroglyphs throughout the South West only intensify the curiosity about the way people lived, their struggle for survival, and their life in the cliff dwellings. 

30' ladder entry to Balcony House

Through a tunnel & up a cliff face to exit

View from Balcony House

Cougar & Kachina whip petroglyphs

My husband and I went in late April this year, which is a good time to go because temperatures soar into triple digits in the summer, and the altitude takes a toll. Bring plenty of water. The highest point in the park, near the guest lodge, is about 9,000 ft. Most of the sites can be seen from overlooks and drive-to vista points, but if you hike the trails or take the ranger guided tours, be prepared to climb ladders, crawl through tunnels, climb rock faces, clamber over rocks, and be awed by the beauty of this national treasure.

Petroglyph wall

Food Challenges of the Congo: Do Whatever It Takes

By Jenni Legate

I started this post with light-hearted, childhood memories of meals we had when my family lived in Kinshasa, Congo. Then a news piece caught my eye, and I realized how frivolous my food challenges were in comparison to people living in the country today.

I like good food, but there are times when it's better to eat than complain, namely, when you are hungry and in the Third World.

Our morning routine in Kinshasa was to pour stale Corn Flakes into a bowl, add re-constituted powdered milk, wait for the weevils that infested the cereal to float to the top, scoop them off and onto a plate, and then eat our cereal with gusto. I never questioned this routine.

Mom made freeze-dried cottage cheese that she reconstituted for a meal. She made freeze-dried sweet potatoes which were horrible when they were reconstituted, but we gagged them down when we were hungry anyway. We made our own sausages and patties. We boiled and filtered endless amounts of water. We soaked our vegetables in iodine. Our kitchen was like a mad scientist’s laboratory with giant kettles of water boiling, a series of stainless steel filtration and storage containers, racks for drying foods, a large pantry, and food in various stages of preparation.



Mango tree by Robert McLean
CCx2.0

We had fruit trees, mango, lemon, lime, guava, and pomegranate. When we ate mangos, the sweet juice ran down our arms. Sugar cane grew in our back yard, mixed in with the snake-infested bamboo. One piece of sugar cane was savored and sucked on all day. Wisely, my parents only allowed this as a special treat, or my teeth would be rotted out by now.

Our favorite trip into downtown Kinshasa was to a French bakery, where we made a point of going on baking days. The warm, yeasty scent of fresh-baked bread filled our heads. We selected horn-shaped pastries filled with cream, and we always bought two long loaves of fresh-baked bread: one for the ride home, eaten while still warm, and one for our dinner.

One year, we had a luau for Christmas. It was warm outside, so we planned a pool party. Dad stuck two pigs and hung them in my sister’s bathtub to bleed out. It was horrible and stunk and Susie was nearly sick looking at the pigs’ sagging faces and vacant eyes staring down the drain; slit throats with blood oozing out. We roasted the pigs on a spit over a couple of fire pits we dug in the back yard near the swimming pool. Our guests exclaimed at how tender it was, how easily it pulled apart. We made cracklings from the skin. We ate pork for weeks after that. Susie could not eat it.

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Mobutu - Wikipedia
photo

We left the Congo in 1971 before the worst of Mobutu's policies came to fruition. "Zairianization" had yet to spasm into a wave of nationalism and expropriation of foreign-owned properties and assets. Mobutu's tacit approval of theft and corruption was already ingrained in the public psyche, but the infamous Article 15 had yet to be adopted as a way of life throughout the country. Article 15 was a sarcastic reference to a statement made by a diamond mining boss of Katanga province in frustration at repeated appeals for help from refugees fleeing violence in the area: “Débrouillez-vous pour vivre,” (do whatever it takes to stay alive).  Mobutu's dictatorship was brutal, crime was rampant, and the poor struggled to find ways to make a living, but food was still abundant when we moved. Desperation was becoming a way of life for many.

Mobutu’s corruptions eventually brought the Congo to its knees. The country then became embroiled in over two decades of civil war that spilled over the borders after the Rwanda genocide. That conflict continues today. Life for most Congolese is a daily struggle. Over 50 percent of the population lives on under a dollar a day.

Congolese women at water station by Julien Harneis CCx2.0

In 2012 in Eastern Congo, the UN estimated that over 1.5 million people were on the move, fleeing the fighting. A UN news article dated May 3, 2013, stated that Mai-Mai fighters in the east have propelled over 200,000 people into flight since April, and there are at least 354,000 internally-displaced refugees trying to escape the conflict in the Katanga province alone. The UN’s World Food Programme is working to provide food security to more than 3 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in spite of warfare, bad roads, and the isolation and distance between populations being served.

During times of warfare, the fields and rivers are too dangerous for people to farm or fish. During peaceful times, cassava is a staple food of the Congo. Plantains, palms, nuts, fruits, fish, and bush meat supplement their diet. When we lived there, lots of Congolese people ate crickets as a delicacy. Grubs and caterpillars are also sought out for their protein.

Piri piri peppers by Orrling CCx3.0

Tim Butcher’s travel memoir of the Congo, Blood River, recounts his meeting with a village chief in Mukumbo near Lake Tanganyika who reminisces about his country’s history. The village used to be served by buses and cars and other symbols of modern life. Since the conflict, nothing remains. When fighting nears, the villagers flee into the bush, which they have learned is the safest place for them. Their village is continually being destroyed and must be rebuilt. Butcher comments, “The normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary, and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.”

Centuries of colonialism, slavery, corruption, and warfare have thrust the country into survival mode where food insecurity is the norm and food choices are a luxury. Progress is being made slowly, but the situation is fragile.

Meals in the Third World can be a challenge, but this is true nowhere more than in the Congo.

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