Chicken Fingers

As most of my family and friends know, I’m a pretty picky eater.  College has done many wonders for expanding my palette, but still I’m a sucker for plain pasta with marinara sauce and some good ole’ chicken fingers.  So, naturally, I had a bit of anxiety about becoming a bit malnourished myself while living in Africa for six weeks.  What’s funny is I’ve had a lot of typical American food while I’m here because we cook our own meals in TTL’s kitchen, so I’ve been well fed.  I even brought enough protein bars to last me for an entire five weeks worth of outreach days!  Let me tell you, though, cooking in a developing country is not as easy as I just made it sound.

Hard at work in the fields.

First of all, the options for ingredients in Mokhotlong are limited.  In fact, to get any dairy products aside from whole milk and some sketchy cheese slices, we have to travel to a grocery store 5 hours away in Maseru…no joke!  Maseru is also the only place to get safe-to-eat meat (I miss my chicken fingers!).  For this reason, every time someone gets picked up or dropped off at the airport there, all of us living at TTL send money and a shopping list with the driver.  We actually went straight to Pick n’ Pay, the food store with the largest selection of items in Maseru, from the airport when I arrived a month ago.  It was pretty overwhelming try to plan meals three weeks in advance, and it still is!  Needless to say, we use each food item sparingly.  Not only are dairy products hard to come by, but so are fruits and vegetables aside from the spinach that grows in TTL’s garden.  Luckily, there is a truck that arrives on Mokhotlong every Wednesday full of fruits and vegetables from South Africa.  If you don’t get to it’s stop right away, however, your options become limited quickly.  It seems as if everyone is town rushes to the “fruit & veg” truck (as we call it) to gather their stock for the week…you snooze you lose!

Maize from one of TTL's clients (Read below!)

Maize grinder in a rondavel.

As if planning so far in advance wasn’t a hard enough adjustment for this girl who’s been getting prepared training table dinners for the past 2 years, I quickly learned that following online recipes isn’t always so easy.  We have to substitute ingredients quite often, which always makes for an interesting meal.  Last week Brad and I attempted to make a stir fry peanut sauce…let’s just say we had to add a lot of milk and water to dampen the taste of white vinegar and cayenne pepper.  Luckily, I have two working parents with quick and easy meal recipes (that still require some substitutions!) that have saved dinner time ever since.  And there’s always South Africa’s version of Honey Cheerio’s if all else fails.

Speaking of Cheerio’s, I was totally freaked out by the milk when I first arrived here.  We drink UHT milk (ultra-high-temperature processed milk), a super-pasteurized milk product that you don’t need to refrigerate it until it’s opened.  You’re probably thinking sour milk, but I’m thinking Alleluliah!  If we had to refrigerate all of our milk, there wouldn’t be room for anything else in the refrigerator.  It actually tastes pretty normal, and is really useful for people in Mokhotlong who don’t all have access to a large refrigerator (if they have one at all).  Apparently a lot of people drink it in Europe, but there is much debate on whether drinking this type of milk is really a healthy option.  I’ve had no digestive problems so far, and in a place with no other real options, UHT milk is better than no milk.

Maize meal, maize meal, everywhere!  At a shop in Mokhotlong owned by an outreach worker's brother.

Okay, back to the cooking.  One night, right in the middle of Colleen and I cooking a meal, all of the power went off in Mokhotlong.  Not a home in sight had power! (Except for TTL’s safe home, which has an emergency generator to keep the babies warm.)  All of a sudden, it was like we were living in the villages.  We cooked the rest of the meal and ate it by candle light, hoping the power would come back by the next morning.  All of the power going out doesn’t happen too often, but our internet connection gets lost all the time – both true reminders that I’m living in a developing country.

Candle light cooking...candle light meal!

From the first day I got here, all I kept hear about was papa and moroho, the traditional Basotho meal (seriously, they sometimes eat this morning, noon, and night).  The way they say it almost makes it sound like a Spanish meal!  “Papa” refers to cooked maize meal, which is essentially plain southern gritz with all of the moisture sucked out of it.  Moroho refers to any sort of green vegetable, usually cabbage, spinach, or kale.  On days I didn’t go on outreach, I would always find TTL’s staff sitting outside eating this for lunch.  I decided to ask them about it one afternoon, and they were nice enough to cook some for me!  I gathered the maize meal from our kitchen, had our gardener pick some spinach for me, pulled out the pots, and got to cooking (well, I didn’t really do the cooking, I just watched and learned).  Basotho chop the spinach into small pieces and fry it with some flavoringor spices, we added beef stock cubes, while the papa are cooked just like rice.  When its finished, you put them on a plate next to each other and eat it with your hands!  It felt odd to eat food with my hands, but sort of freeing at the same time…don’t worry, I won’t be using this technique in American restaurants anytime soon.  I really enjoyed this meal and decided in typical Basotho fashion to eat it for lunch and dinner!  Much of the time some sort of meat is paired with it, like eggs or matton (sheep meat), in order to create a balanced meal.

TTL's gardener picking spinach from the garden for our "moroho"

Maize meal (papa) and spinach (moroho)!

The finished product...yum!

Generally in the villages, meat is expensive and scarce, so the diet is largely based on carbs like maize and wheat.  Hence why TTL gives nutritional supplements full of protein, such as minced meat, fish, and beans.  On one outreach visit, a mother gave my translator and I some maize from her fields…it was very yummy!  In some of the rondavels I’ve spotted small maize grinders that people use to make papa from scratch.  Basotho usually use wheat to make homemade bread.  Makoenya bread, steam bread, large doughy bread, thin circular bread…you name it, they’ve got it.  Did I mention potatoes are big here too?  Basotho often make french fries at home, but they refer to them as "chips" like in Britain.  The spices they scatter on top are just so tasty!  I don’t know how anyone here remains skinny surrounded by all these carbs.  In fact, I think I’ll be avoiding the scale for the first few days I’m back home…

Makoenya's frying in the best makoenya shop in town

This was the fluffiest (and largest slice of) bread I've ever had!

Sephaphathoa (say-pah-pah-twa) bread...yum!

Another important aspect of Basotho food culture is joala (jwala), or beer.  The word joala means beer, so it can refer to any can or bottle of beer.  Basotho joala, however, is home-fermented beer.  Women make joala and sell it to make money both in town and out in the villages, and rondavels or shops selling joala always have a white “flag” outside of it (I put flag in parentheses because the flag is usually just a piece of white cloth or a bag tied to the top of a long tree trunk).  There is one area in town where a large group of “bars” (tin shops labeled as a bar) sell joala and have their white flags flying…we call it the Joala District!  Colleen and I decided that we had to try Basotho joala because we heard it was very strong.  We bought it from a tin shop, took one sip, and vowed to never have it again.  It did taste strongly of alcohol, but because it’s homemade the texture is very grainy and it’s not very tasty.  Worth the try!

My first joala tasting....didn't love it!

The Joala Doistrict...check out all those white flags!

So finally, on my second to last night here, I got my chicken fingers!  Literally, they were chicken fingers. I find that when I’m in a foreign country, I get the urge to try local delicacies that I would never touch at home (in Ecuador I ate guinea pig!).  During my first week here I thought I saw someone eating chicken feet, but quickly told myself there was no way.  It turns out I was right, and the people here love it!  Tonight, on the way back from outreach, my translator had the driver stop at a small shop to get me chicken feet.  The flavor was good, but boy was the texture weird.  At first I tried to eat it like a chicken wing, but then realized all I was getting at was skin and some tendon.  After building up the courage and watching my translator nearly die laughing at me, I decided to do as the Basotho and just bite the toe right off the foot…nail and all.  It was crunchy, and the more I thought about what I was eating the more I decided this last bite was enough.  I can’t say that I will ever eat chicken feet again, but I’m glad I tasted it while I was here.  I think I’ve just decided that my first meal back in the US will be real chicken fingers…or maybe chicken tenders is how I will refer to them from now on!  USA here I come!

Chicken fingers!

Proof that I bit off an entire finger and ate it!

Enjoy some more pictures of Basotho food culture!

Some families receive food from the World Food Programme (WFP) and Lesotho's government.

Some of the nutritional supplements TTL gives to its clients.

Handing out food to TTL clients at a clinic site today.

This woman is peeling potatoes to make a stew.

A woman sorting wheat seeds from the wheat stalks.

The wheat my translator made me for a snack.

Hiking Pants

Packing for Lesotho was a difficult task.  It was finally starting to get warm in South Bend, and there I was trying to pack for the dead of winter in a dry mountain region.  For the first time, choosing which shoes to bring was the easiest part of packing: sneakers and hiking boots!  I wanted to make sure I brought tons of layers, but also clothes that were culturally appropriate.  But what was considered culturally appropriate? What type of clothing do people in Mokhotlong wear?  The entire packing process was a guessing game.  All I really knew was that skirts above the knee were unacceptable, and considering I was headed for winter weather, skirts weren’t exactly on my packing list.  In the end I went with lots of long sleeve shirts, a couple fleeces, sweat pants, a pair of jeans, and hiking pants.

Luckily, people in “downtown” Mokhotlong generally wear the same winter clothes that we do at home, so I fit in quite well.  Here they walk around in jeans with boots or sneakers, and wear sweaters with winter coats.  Hats and scarves are common, too.  Children wear the same things as adults, unless on a school day when you see them all walking home in red, green, blue, or grey uniforms.  I quickly learned that looser clothing is a more common and traditional way of dressing when I walked into town in spandex and sneakers one day and got a lot of stares…oops!  Since Jason now lives at Notre Dame most of the year, I asked him if he thought Americans dressed similarly to Basotho.  He told me that he thought American girls dressed very “loose” compared to girls here…I guess he has a different meaning of loose than I do!  Jason and Maseeng said that girls wear more form-fitting and exposed clothing in Maseru because it is a modern area, but here in Mokhotlong people rarely even wear shorts in the summertime because the skin exposure is inappropriate in the more traditional setting.

A uniform shop in town.

Even within Mokhotlong’s conservative style there are some very notable exceptions to the clothing norm that are worth sharing.  The first is how the shepherds dress, which clearly distinguishes them from the rest of Mokhotlong’s population (you can find those details in the post titled “I Spy”).  The second is somewhat typical when one thinks about African attire: headscarves.  Many of the women here wear patterned headscarves to cover their fully braided heads.  I’ve tried one on, and they do not look nearly as elegant on me as they do on the Basotho.  I guess one could say that the third exception, although not a clothing item, is hair.  It’s actually hard to find women with long hair here, which is quite the opposite from the trend in America.  One of TTL’s safe home staff told me that women here simply can’t grow their hair out very long and that anyone I do see with long hair has extensions.  Getting your hair done here is quite a lengthy and expensive process.  Some women have their hair braided in patterns I didn’t even know were possible!  Girls who have extensions often have them with highlights of blonde or red, as well.  I thought about trying out some extensions while I was here (well, it was a 2-second thought), but I have yet to see extensions fully matching my light hair color.  I have, on the other hand, had a teenage girl ask for my hair…she said she wanted to put it on her head!  I told her my family wouldn’t approve if I came back to the US without hair!

I LOVE her headscarf!

Check out all the extensions hanging up in this shop!

My translator had longgg extensions at the beginning of my trip.

A woman getting her hair braided in town.  The girl doing her hair is wearing the traditional Lesotho hat!

On my first day of outreach, I was quick to pick up the fourth thing that distinguishes rural Mokhotlong and village people from the later-generation townspeople: blankets!  And these are not just any ordinary blanket…they are thick, patterned, and colorful.  The patterns vary, but most are representative of Basotho culture.  For example, they are adorned with images of maize, crowns, and donkeys.  The more traditional folk use these blankets as coats by simply wrapping them around the body and pinning them at the neck with the largest-sized safety pin I have ever seen.  The blankets are very large, so they provide warmth and protection from head to toe.  Shops here even sell miniature versions of the blankets to fit young children!  I mostly see men wearing these heavy blankets and instead find that women more often pin a thinner, plaid blanket around their waist or over their shoulders.  Very young children in the villages wear these plaid blankets for protection from the cold as well.  Interestingly, the heavy, more traditional blankets are the first item I’ve found in Mokhotlong to be judged by their label.  The brand to buy is called “Aranda” and it is quite expensive by Basotho standards (and when I think about it, expensive for a blanket by American standards, too).  Some people spend a very long time saving up their money to purchase one of these “coats.”  Imagine having to save just to purchase a blanket!  I asked my translator if she had a blanket of her own and she just laughed at me, I guess she’s too hip to be wearing one of them.  When I visited her home the other day, though, I noticed right away that her grandmother was wearing a black and yellow one.  This is one Basotho tradition that I pray doesn’t disappear as generations pass, they are just too unique to let go of!

The blanket varieties on patients outside of a village clinic. 

An example of the traditional Aranda blanket.

This man embroidered his shepherd-style blanket.

Some young village children all wrapped up!

The final piece of attire that is not typically used for everyday wear is the “se shoe shoe” (pronounced “seh shway swhay”…I bet you pronounced it “seh shoo shoo” like I did at first!).  The se shoe shoe is the most traditional form of clothing for a Basotho woman.  Se shoe shoe refers to the type of patterned material that is most often made into a dress, either knee-length or floor-length, with decorated pockets and puffy shoulders.  Se shoe shoe is unlike the typical material you think of when you think African patterns.  Instead of bright colors and animal silhouettes, the se shoe shoe usually is a blue, red, or brown material with a small, but repeated white pattern.  There are some variations to this visual, but typically se shoe shoe’s fit this mold.  You can have a se shoe shoe custom made or you can buy one right from a little tin shop on the street; either way, every Basotho female has one.  It is rare that you see a woman or girl wearing her se shoe shoe on a regular day, as they are usually reserved for special occasions like weddings or church or the King’s birthday celebration (which is July 17^th by the way, the entire country celebrates it!).  It’s too bad I didn’t have an excuse to wear a se shoe shoe while I was here!

You can see some se shoe shoe skirts peaking out from under the blankets of these VHWs.

A tailor making a se shoe shoe skirt.

A group of typical se shoe shoe dresses hanging in a small shop in town.

A little girl in her se shoe shoe...look how large that safety-pin is around her neck!

Finally, the hallmark of Lesotho is the national hat.  It's silhouette is seen on the flag, and you know that anything with the hat is from Lesotho.  Very few people here actually wear it, sometimes you see people with variations of it riding horses or working in the fields, but this is rare.  In fact, they don't even sell these hats in Mokhotlong!  You have to get one at one of the border sites or in Maseru.  Funny that a national symbol is almost nowhere to be found!

Flag of Lesotho.

My Lesotho hat!

While I was thinking about all the things I’ve written in this post, I realized I left out a very important aspect of clothing out in the villages.  In my time spent on outreach, almost every person I saw had holes in their shirts, frayed pants, dirt patches, and shoes with the soles falling off.  In fact, tons of people don’t even wear shoes.  I realized that I painted this picture of beautiful scarves, blankets, and normal clothing that doesn’t really apply to half of the people living in this district.  I am actually embarrassed when I think about the size of my wardrobe and compare it to the few options for clothing that these people have to wear each day.  Most rondavels have one or two suitcases holding all the clothing for a family a four or more.  When I reflect on the cultural differences between my country and Lesotho, it is impossible not to be reminded that so much of our differences stem from the poverty that persists here from generation to generation.  To think that I went out and bought hiking pants for this trip that probably cost the same amount of an entire outfit here is really mind-boggling…and also makes me feel guilty.  Not buying the hiking pants wouldn’t solve the poverty issues here in Lesotho, and neither would simply buying more clothes for the people.  But if we invested more of our money into development programs that have been proven to work rather than on personal items, imagine the change that could take place…I know, easier said than done!  I guess what I am trying to get at is that merely reflecting on clothing differences, on my hiking pants, is enough of a reality check to really make me think about what’s most important in life and to thank God for all of the opportunities I have.  I wish that the people I’ve met and the friends I’ve made here will have these same opportunities one day, as well.

Child's blanket with huge safety pin, and villager earrings.

A group of children in blankets, dirty, and ripped clothing.  Welcome to Lesotho.

My hiking pants are shockingly flexible!