The Exponential Power of Spices

If you think rice and beans are boring, solve this math problem. 

A true Mozambican Meal consists of 92% massa and 8% carril. Massa literally means mass, or dough. It’s a ball or scoop or chunk or plateful of some type of starch, consumed with the sole purpose of filling the stomach. Usually it’s either rice or xima (cornmeal mush patties – more on these later. They deserve a post all to themselves. Pronounced “she-mah”). The carril is something to give the massa a little flavor, to help wash it down, and to get some protein or fiber into your diet. The most common Nauelan carrils are beans, dried fish, cabbage, tomatoes, leaves (leafy greens, not like mango tree leaves), or, on rare occasions, chicken.

So let’s say every meal must have either rice or xima. And those two types of massa can be eaten with one of the 6 aforementioned carrils.

2 x 6 - 1 = 11

Already, we have 11 different meals! I took one away because cabbage doesn’t go well with xima.

Throughout the year, with the help of care packages (thank you! These are lifesavers for my mental health, and threats to my physical health) and trips to city grocery stores, I’ve built up a small collection of spices. I have about 10 different spices - chili powder, cumin, thyme, basil, cinnamon, curry powder, lemon pepper, parsley, ginger, and “spice for rice.” So each of those 11 meals can be prepared with a different spice.

11 x 10 - 1 = 109

Voila, we have now jumped up to 109 different meals! I took one away because I don’t think cinnamon would go well with xima and dried fish. Although, I’ve never tried it. Experiment for next week, puh-haps?

Here’s where the exponential part comes in. Think, just think! You are not limited to just one spice per meal! You can use two spices in the same dish! So in addition to the 109 different meals that can be made with one spice only, we have a whole new selection of entrees, using double spices! Oh, my taste buds are hurting just typing this!

109 + 109 x 9 - 36 = 1054

I took away 36 because “spice for rice” doesn’t go well with xima. And, now that I think about it, it’s not stellar in rice either. But I’m not looking for gourmet meals here, just something to wash down my xima. And since it’s 9:45pm, it’s 2 hours past my bedtime, so I’m having a hard time thinking through the math, but no matter. Even if I’m 10 or so meals off, I already have enough of a variety to eat a different meal every day for 2 years of Peace Corps. I would only have to repeat meals if I decided to extend a third year.

So have I convinced you that you wouldn’t get bored with a diet of rice and beans and dried fish and tomatoes and cornmeal mush patties for 2 years? If so, please contact me ASAP and help me convince myself.

And send any recipes you find that utilize a combination of the edibles mentioned in this post.

Just ignore the housefly on the rim of the bowl.

"I am healthy to be, I don't know about yourself?"

Test-correction time is a time of red pens, stiff necks, and entertaining assertions from students who don't quite understand what they're saying in English (or maybe they do...?). Let me share a few of them with you:

"In Nauela, live many animals, rational and irrational."

"I like to eat rice and stove."

"How is ya'll's life in Mozambique?" (copied directly from a letter sent to us by students in Alabama. Sometimes when a student doesn't know an answer to a test question, they just copy any random sentence they find when they sneak a peek into their notebooks)

[in response to the question, 'what would you like to be after finishing school?'] "Quero fincar professora." Fincar is not actually a word but I think she meant to write "quero vingar professora" which means "I want to get revenge on the teacher."  Should I be worried?

My test was copied incorrectly onto the board by another teacher - there's no photocopier so we don't hand out paper tests, we write them up on the board - so when the students copied it onto their papers, instead of the response I was looking for, 'big dog,' I got a variety of responses such as:  "bong bing," "bing tong,"and "dong bing."

In response to the question, 'how old are you?' a student tried to write sixteen, but just wrote six, and spelled it "sex" (a common mistake). In addition, he wrote "I have..." instead of "I am..." (another common mistake, because translated directly from Portuguese, it would be "I have 16 years," like Spanish) so the result was, "I have sex."

The charred pot: a persistent presence in my sink bucket

Moments ago, as I was posting the previous post, I was simultaneously but unintentionally burning my lunch, a pot of beans. Coincidence? Power of suggestion? Self-fulfilling prophecy? I'll never know.

Mini-Dictionaries and Ugly Jesuses

No matter how the play turned out, two things were inevitable: the phrase “what the heck!” would be incorporated somehow, and at least one boy would stuff his chest.

When we began writing a skit for the annual English Theater competition, I tried to explain why I thought an all-male cast presenting a play about gender equality would be a contradiction. I tried to use questions like “look around you – is there gender equality in this room?” but my blossoming male feminists were determined to use that particular theme.

Sometimes it’s hard for kids to understand why it’s so difficult for girls to get a good education. Students see their colleagues, who are mostly male, and conclude that boys are smarter than girls. But at home, children are expected to do a lot of work – cooking, cleaning, carrying water, taking care of younger siblings – chores which are usually delegated to the girls. It leaves little time for studying. In addition, many girls marry as teenagers – one of my strongest female students just got married at 14 – and as wives, there is no reason for them to continue their education, because their job is to have kids. Therefore, there are very few girls in our English group, and those that are didn’t succeed in memorizing the audition text I had assigned to choose the final group for the competition. Ideally, to communicate a message about the importance of gender equality, I would want half girls and half boys in the group. But maybe the fact that we couldn’t even get one girl shows how important it is for us to address the issue.

In our skit, the husband comes home hungry after working in the field to find that his wife has not cooked. Thus, the students were able to apply a recent lesson I had taught on calão (colloquialisms) and our favorite line “What the heck! You didn’t prepare the lunch?” (with a Portuguese/Lomwe accent) was born. The husband goes to his in-laws for advice, who say that “everyone must divide the jobs equally.”

Competition weekend started off with a giant pot of beans, which I, contrary to past attempts, did not burn. I delegated the preparation of the corn-meal mush patties to the students, because I haven’t been able to get the consistency just right (“I am not eating this,” my neighbor announced when she tasted my handiwork). After rehearsing one last time, the kids (9 boys between the ages of 14 and 19), my counterpart (the teacher I work with, also 50% of my friends) and I ate dinner all together. Since we had to leave at 4 the next morning, and some live an hour away by bike, I had the bright idea of having them all sleep on my living room floor.

Unsurprisingly, Mozambican slumber parties are just like US slumber parties: there is no slumber involved whatsoever. My dear, studious, well-behaved boys shut their eyelids for a total of about 17 minutes. The rest of the night, they were rocking out on my guitar, listening to Michael Jackson and Hey There Delilah on repeat, reading all my text messages, and chatting animatedly in 73% Portuguese, 84% Lomwe (their native language) and 43% English. At midnight, a solid 4 hours after the entire town had gone to bed, they put on leotards and danced in the street. At 2am I heard, “I feel like going for a walk,” so 3 boys disappeared; five minutes later the other 6 were wide awake and dancing the Macarena.

There were 7 groups at the competition, all presenting skits with this year’s theme “We are all equal.” We didn’t win, or get second place, or third, or fourth, but they each received a mini-dictionary and T-shirt, which they have been carrying and wearing proudly every day since the competition. It was their first time acting, but they got their message across, showed some strong potential for next year, and made me laugh until my stomach muscles were tired. My favorite line of the weekend: one kid put on a coat that looked like a robe and pranced around, and another kid declared, “You is Jesus. You is ugly Jesus!”