Ackee

We were told we had 2 cashew trees in our yard. Our guardians were certain of it too.  Yummy!   Then we researched how to prepare cashews.  Wow, not easy, in fact, not really safe.  Come to find out, we don’t have cashew trees.  After seeing the inside of the fruit, we realized they weren’t cashews.  We did more research and finally found a picture of what’s growing on our trees.  

Ackee!  Ever heard of it?  I hadn’t.  Ackee is actually the national fruit of Jamaica.  Ackee trees originated in West Africa and were imported to Jamaica in the 1700s.  Ackee has been banned in the United States because it’s toxic.  Well, not when it’s ripe, but if you pick an ackee before it’s ripe and pry it open, it is toxic.  It causes what the Jamaicans call “Jamaican Vomiting Sickness” which often leads to death.  Thankfully, it’s easy to tell when they are ripe, because they break open on their own, revealing their black seeds. 

I have now tried ackee raw and also boiled & sautéed.  It tastes alright, not great, but not bad.  It was actually similar to scrambled eggs when boiled and then sautéed, but a little nutty.  

I haven’t thrown up yet, so no toxicity.  However, the three times I’ve eaten some, I’ve felt sick and had to make a few extra trips to the bathroom…  I don’t think I’ll be trying it again.  

Here’s to hoping our Mango tree bears good fruit!

Eating Like Americans in Africa

Never have I used so much oil!  I was shocked when I saw our 3L bottle of oil was almost gone in less than a month.  I never used that much oil in a whole year when living in the States.  I still try not to use much oil, but Africans love to use oil.  I felt so sick to my stomach thinking about how our family had ingested all that oil in less than a month.  We asked our house helper to use less and now a 3L bottle of oil lasts about 2 months, but that still seems like a lot of oil (fat).  Somehow we aren’t gaining weight though, in fact Micah and I (mostly Micah) are losing weight.  It’s not just from sweating either.  Instead, it’s because we don’t have many processed foods or fast food at all.  We drink more purified water and eat a lot of fresh produce that hasn’t had a bunch of chemicals, oil, and sugars added to it.  So we can add as much fat and sugar as we like and are still consuming less than we did in the U.S.  As long as I don’t make too many cookies anyway.  Bad addiction.

I didn't have any pictures to add to this post, so I took some pictures of the food we have here.

In our fridge:  We have lots of drinks (mainly water), margarine, mayonnaise, yummy pork broth (from cooking a bunch of pork in our pressure cooker), leftovers, yogurt, watermelon, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, bananas, plantain, finger paint, hard boiled eggs (raw eggs we keep out of the fridge), chocolate!, butter, ketchup, mustard, parmesan cheese (from the States), homemade ranch dressing, play-doh, more beverages, and jelly.  Everything was purchased here except for the parmesan cheese, ziplock containers, and pitcher.

I’m still working on perfecting a variety of dishes to prepare for our family.  Most of our meals start with a salad or have some kind of vegetable and end with a fruit for dessert.  There are a few dishes my family sees often.  Having little kids, mac and cheese & hot dogs was the first perfected dish.  We can get many varieties of pasta and Laughing Cow cheese (“The Cow Who Laughs” is the reverse-translation from the French).  That’s pretty much the only kind of cheese; the local cheese just doesn't cut it for us Wisconsinites.  The hot dogs are imported and chicken based, but surprisingly pretty good—maybe that’s because they’re processed!  My spaghetti sauce from tomato paste isn’t the best yet, but we’re getting there.  I’ve been trying to use my Italian seasonings sparingly, since I don’t have a lot, nor can I buy more here.  I think our favorite dish so far is a made up Mexican rice dish.  Our house helper makes us a pot of beans in a tomato sauce each week and I make some rice and add some taco seasoning and laughing cow cheese and/or sour cream (old homemade yogurt).  The first time I tried mixing all these things, I could almost taste Chipotle Mexican Grill…almost!

In our little pantry:  Top left we have my "Pseudo-American" shelf of items which are mostly found here, except for some of my baking ingredients - cream of tartar, vanilla, and food coloring - along with the cheddar cheese & sour cream powders which came from the States.  Top right we have my African and American shelf: pasta, rice, corn meal, beans, milk powder, tomato paste, chicken bouillon, curry powder, bags, skewers, and matches.  Bottom left we have my all American shelf, the Coca-Cola and potatoes are from here though.  The Ziplock container is full of food from the States like Gatorade powder, pepperoni, pre-cooked bacon (well there once was), M&Ms and granola bars.  The bottom right is my all African shelf, ignames (yams) and in the back are our 2 African cooking pots and a grinding pot.

So after 5 months of living in Africa we are still finding new foods and trying new things, but we have thankfully found enough foods thus far to survive well!  A few other foods I’ve tried and we’ve all really liked, but just don’t make every week because of time and/or lack of ingredients, are pizza, cole slaw, cheeseburger soup, tortillas, cinnamon rolls, & pulled pork.

In our little freezer (someday we will get around to getting a solar chest freezer):  The bottom drawer has meat, cheese, and frozen water bottles.  The middle drawer has vegetables.  The top drawer has flour, sugar, coffee, milk powder, and FanIce (ice cream).

Foods we can’t get here that we ate a lot of in the states include good meat, bacon, pepperoni, ground beef, lunch meat, cheese (except Laughing Cow), broccoli, sweet corn, grapes, berries, strawberries, most seasonings, powdered sugar, good breakfast food, American chocolate (we have found a place with European chocolates though that are quite satisfying), chips (except for Pringles, oddly enough), real ice cream and custard.

It definitely helps that we have an excellent house helper that cooks 2 African dishes for us each week (which actually turns into 4 or more meals with leftovers).  She also comes early enough to make breakfast 3 times a week.  That only leaves 14 other meals I have to plan and prepare during the week.  I figured the other day, if we didn’t have a house helper who helped with the cooking, we would be going out to eat a couple times each week at least.  If we just went out one time a week, it would cost us more than we pay our house helper for an entire week.  Having a house helper actually saves us money in the long run.  And that’s even taking the cost of food into consideration.  She makes us African meals that don’t cost much at all, actually saving us even more money than if I was cooking a half local, half imported meal.

Perhaps in another post, I will touch on the African dishes which our house helper has made and is teaching me.

Weather

That's not fog in the distance.  That's dust.  Also notice the man on the motorcycle wearing a coat and near the center of the picture a man buying a coat on the side of the road.  

Welcome to our "winter" aka harmattan.

If dust was snow (try replacing the word snow every time you see the word dust below), we’d have a white Christmas for sure, possibly even a blizzard.  It’s harmattan season here in Dapaong (December-February), which means dry, “cold”, dusty days.

Dusty
Thankfully the dust doesn’t fall from the sky, but it does blow around a lot.  The first dust storm which we experienced started in the middle of the night.  I remember waking up around 2am and not being able to get back to sleep.  It smelled and felt like I was breathing in dust.  Unfortunately, I was too tired to realize we were experiencing a dust storm or I would have gotten up to close all the windows and cover a few things.  You live and learn!  When we woke up we could see the dust hovering in the air outside…and inside our house along with a nice layer of dust on everything throughout the house.  Thankfully, we haven’t had another dust storm since the first one, giving us time to put some things away and find coverings for bookshelves and the like.  Even without another dust storm, there's dust everywhere, inside and out.  We often feel like we are breathing in dust. (haha, that’s kind of funny replacing the word dust with snow here)

“Cold”
The first dust storm didn’t just bring dust from the north, but it also brought the cold—cold according to West Africans, that is.  We see people walking around selling coats and blankets, and most everyone is wearing long sleeve shirts, jackets, coats, or shawls (the ladies use a panel of fabric which can also be used as a skirt, baby carrier, etc).  To us Americans, it feels amazing to not be sweating all day long!  The temperature gets down to 63F at night, but still up to 93F during the day.  To me, it feels like the beginning of fall and I love it (except for the dust in my nose!).  I love no longer seeing 30 degrees celsius (86F) on my indoor thermometer when I wake up in the morning.  Now it gets down to 25.5 degrees celsius (78F) in the morning, it's fantastic!  Sam's been cold in the mornings even with pants and a long sleeve shirt... he's so African!

Rainy
Our first 3 months here in Dapaong (August, September, & October) were filled with hot and humid, rainy days.  At first it seemed like we’d have a rain storm every afternoon.  I realized this quickly because I’d always be rushing outside to get our clothes off the line before the rains poured down on them.  After a few weeks, the rains seemed to be more sporadic, coming anytime during the day, with a few dry days here and there.

Dry
It hasn’t rained since October and probably won’t rain again until May or June.  November was dry and hot.  The temperatures were higher, but the rain and humidity were gone, so it was bearable.  Along with the rain and humidity, the majority of bugs disappeared!  Don’t get me wrong, we still have plenty of bugs, but at least we don’t have to go around vacuuming up a bazillion flying bugs in the kids’ rooms before they go to bed at night anymore (that’s another story).

Hot
It’s always hot, even when it’s “cold”.  And yet, the heat wave season is yet to come in March!

Holidays

Celebrating holidays isn’t like it used to be.  We used to go to so many fall and winter events in Milwaukee, from Fall festivals and pumpkin patches to Christmas parades and Candy Cane Lane (several blocks of Christmas lights) just to name a few.  Really, we did a lot of activities with our friends in the fall and winter and had so much fun.  It’s not easy to think about these past events while casting aside the desire for what we can’t have.  Yet, it is nice to reflect upon all the good times we had and the good times we will have.

Annual family picture at Candy Cane Lane, December 5, 2014.

Now, we don’t have a lot of decorations nor events to go to which remind us that Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner.  In fact I didn’t really think about Thanksgiving until the week of.  On top of zero fall decorations and activities, I didn’t have the cool fall weather to warn me Thanksgiving was coming soon.  It was hotter than ever in November (yet thankfully no longer humid).

I don’t want Advent and Christmas to pass us by, so we are working hard making Advent and Christmas decorations.  Not that we let the other holidays pass us by.  The kids worked hard on their Luther’s seals for Reformation, pumpkins for Halloween, and turkeys for Thanksgiving.

The only part of the house that was decorated for fall was the kids' doors.  That's slowly changing for Advent and Christmas.  (The pictures on their doors are the kids with their Baptismal sponsors at this time last year.)

Now they’ve made an Advent wreath with candles and also ornaments for our Advent tree.  For that, we have an advent calendar with little books that the kids hang on the tree each night during evening prayers.  Yet to come in the next few weeks are a toilet paper roll nativity scene amongst many other crafts.

Right now, Sam is really into cutting and gluing things which is perfect for making decorations for our house (since we did not bring many at all).  We’ve gone through a lot of colored paper and are unfortunately running low.  Hopefully we have enough to make it through all our Christmas crafts.  Thankfully, Sam has learned to be resourceful and color a whole piece of white paper the color he needs for something, such as orange for pumpkins to put all around the house.  White paper is easy enough to find around here; bright colored paper not so much.

So, since we don’t have holiday events to go to (except for the Reformation Celebration at the CLET, which was very nice to have!), we are working hard to remember and celebrate holidays by doing lots of crafts.  Starting new traditions isn’t always easy, but can still be lots of fun.  Our kids aren't phased in the least.  Sam is the only one old enough to remember some of the things we did in Milwaukee thanks to lots of pictures, yet he really enjoys all the crafts now.

Blessings this Advent season as you, too, prepare for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.

Real Life

We took a lot of great pictures on David’s first birthday.  While going through them, I was about to delete this one, but even though it’s not a great picture, it actually tells our life quite well.  This is our real life.  The 3rd child birthday boy off to the side patiently waiting for his birthday cake.  Usually we give the birthday person the first piece, but I was distracted by Liza’s crying, because she didn’t finish her supper and wouldn’t get any cake, so I gave Samuel the first piece because he was so excited and asked so nicely.

But wait, there’s more to this story!  Look closely.  You don’t see a nice birthday cake with frosting and a candle, nor ice cream to eat with the cake.  No, instead you see a sloppy carrot cake stuffed into a square ziplock container because it didn’t come out of the pan nicely.  There isn't nice frosting because I didn’t have a convenient can of frosting or even powdered sugar to make some.  Instead, I poured our first attempt of making homemade yogurt into the birthday cake mold and placed it in the freezer.  Surprisingly, the yogurt mold turned out nicely, but the only thing I had to put it on was a random container lid (very fancy!).  The frozen, unsweetened yogurt served as our frosting and ice cream.  Thankfully what looks like a flop, was really quite tasty.

But wait, you can see much more in this picture.  You can see the containers in the background being used as a shelf, because we haven’t yet had a bookshelf made.  You can see the 2 different colors of paint on the wall, because when we moved in, there was a hole in the wall which was boarded up and welcoming to lots of insects, which we had someone fill with concrete and of course they couldn’t get the paint to match.  Maybe some day we’ll have the whole room repainted.  You can see a box in the corner that contains a keyboard that Micah takes back and forth from CLET 2 times a week to help with a class on the liturgy.  You see our new curtains that didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped b/c of a miscommunication of the dimensions of the larger window (on the right).  It’s a wider window, not a longer window.  You also see the table cloth I bought while down in Lome that is really fun, but does not really go well with all the other colors in the room.  And you see random things on the dining room table, because there’s no where else to put them out of David’s reach.

This is our life.  It’s definitely different then our life in the States, but not different in a bad way.  In the end, it doesn’t really matter that nothing matches or looks nice, we use what we have and make it work.  We are living this life.  It’s hot and humid, things don’t work well, there are bugs and geckos in every room (now instead of swatting the geckos and taking them outside, we call them our friends and welcome them to eat the bugs).  These are the every day negatives, if one can call them that.  But no matter where we live there will always be negatives.  There is no perfect place here on earth.  Thank goodness we’ll be in Paradise someday!  For now, I will enjoy spending time with my family, trying lots of new things, eating FanMilk ice cream (Thank the Lord!), and sharing Christ’s love.

David eventually got his cake and ate it all before we could take a picture.

Settling in

We're settling in to Dapaong.  We've gotten our first mail, had our house blessed, killed a nasty spider, found a surprise in our eggs, enjoyed a lot of African food, figured out when to shop and where to shop and what we can buy at a good price and what we can buy at a not so good price, and our woodwork order was delivered.

Sam and Liza were really excited to open our first mail.  FYI- We've learned that it takes about 20 days to receive mail from the United States (if all goes well).

Sam telling the workers how to set up the tent for our house blessing.

All the produce for the festivities. (note the coffee table, temporarily, in our kitchen)

We had a house blessing service with holy communion.  It was a great way to demonstrate to the students at CLET how to proclaim Christ's presence (and not another) amidst a family and their dwelling.

All the students and faculty at the CLET and members of Alpha & Omega Lutheran Church were invited to the house blessing service.

Empty courtyard the day after as the kids enjoyed a beautiful day.

A little "friend" Micah found in our bathroom at midnight.  Anybody want to identify it for us?

Surprise!  This might not look like much of a surprise, but we haven't seen any white eggs since we left the States.

David really gets into his African food.  Here he's eating cassava.

Less than $10 for all this organic produce.  Anything that can be grown or made locally is extremely cheap and everything that is imported is extremely expensive.  Of course, we have to wash all the produce in bleach water before we can eat it, but our salads are extremely tasty and worth the extra step.  Incase you are wondering, from left to right we have: tomatoes and peppers in the blue bowl, lettuce in the salad spinner, mangos, oranges in the green bowl, bananas, carrots, melon (so cheap I feel like I should give the lady more, about 20 cents a melon), cucumbers, eggplant, and plantain. 

We hardly had any counter space in our kitchen when we moved in. We had to use our coffee table to prepare food, but it is less than 2 feet off the ground, so we had this made by an excellent woodworker to prepare food on and store things.

We also had this made to put our propane tank in and have a place to put things by the stove as well.    Now, I can let David safely crawl around in the kitchen!

These 2 pieces of furniture along with an armoire, desk, and a couple of tables and chairs have really helped us feel settled in.  When you are living out of containers, because there's no where to put things, it's kind of hard to feel settled in.  The house blessing certainly helped a bit as well.

First couple of weeks in Dapaong

Qu'est-ce que c'est? (What is it?)  Is a very common question these days... 

While walking around the market I wonder what lots of things are, especially the spices in little bags which are not labeled.  Yet, thankfully there are lots of familiar things as well.  This picture was taken  on the first trip I made to the market when it started pouring rain and the ladies were covering their produce.

"Liza, you can lay on my shoulder," said Sam in his sweetest voice, 

while others were packing up the trucks to move our belongings from Pastor Gaugert's house to our house.

This is the normal view out our front windshield, as we turn onto our road.  

You can see the wall around our house just behind our neighbors sitting under their tree.

Following the opening service and Micah's installation at CLET. 

Various professors and officials associated with CLET, as well as others representing the Lutheran Church of Togo.

Our family

Our new church where we will attend, Alpha & Omega Lutheran Church

Youth Choir at Alpha & Omega

...because there are no rules on the road.

But we do care about everyone's safety, so the emergency break was on the whole time.

Sunset near our house.

I saw a lot of these along the road from Lomé and thought maybe they were logs for a fire.  

Come to find out, they are yams.

Liza watching Madam Léni, our house helper, show us one way to prepare said yams.

David loving and devouring said yams.

We are still settling in.  Some much needed preperatory work on our house is finished, but we are waiting, and will be for about a month, on some wood work to be finished.  Then we will have places to put things and more counter space in the kitchen to cook efficiently.

Sam helping put up his own mosquito netting. 

Micah and one of our guards getting tools out of the truck before bringing in our new mattress.

It only took a week of sleeping on an air mattress before we got around to buying a mattress for Micah and I.  (The kids already had mattresses.)

I'm still getting used to our food options here as well as settling in...

I wrote down "1 pintade" on the grocery list.  This is what I got.  

A live guinea-fowl on my kitchen floor.  

The kids watched with intrigue as our guard butchered the pintade. The process included finding an egg in the process.  

Our Pintade! 

If the order of these posted pictures seem random, indeed, much of our daily life has been the same.