Racial Discrimination

Let me start of this post with a disclaimer:  Pretty obvious by the title, but within this post, I’m going to talk about Racial Discrimination. By no means am I in any way trying to say that I now understand what it was like to be African-American in the US during the 1950’s or during any other point in time for that matter, today included.  My personal experiences with racial discrimination stem from a handful of isolated incidents in the past that were a result of being Jewish, as well as the most recent one that I’ll describe below.  In no way, shape, or form does my experience growing up as a middle/upper-class privileged suburban white kid allow me to pretend like I now know exactly what it’s like to be part of a minority group just trying to live a normal life and make it in a community of people who are different.  But, I can say that after spending eight months living here as an estrangeiro (a general terms used to label outsiders, foreigners, and immigrants), being called out on a handful of painfully obvious superficial differences, and with my community continuing to discover an endless shopping list of internal ones as well, I have a much better idea.  On to the story…

Today, I was discriminated against because of my skin color.  I never thought it would happen to me.  There was no reason to think it would.  Not until I moved to Africa at least. And because I never thought it would happen to me, I never thought about what it would feel like and how to cope if it did. 
My immediate reactions to the happening is just as confusing and overwhelming as the event was itself.  Emotions running wild.  Anger and hatred against the guy who scorned me; confusion as to why he would judge me simply by the color of my skin; feelings of intense vulnerability make me feel weak, like even the slightest trauma could bring my whole world crashing down; I feel petty, unwanted, insignificant, and for the first time since I’ve been here, alone; but then there’s the most out-of-place and subtle feeling of pride, and I can’t understand why.

This all happened over a coke.  I didn’t know I was supposed to bring back the coke bottle.  This it.  All over a coke.  In my country, we bring the glass bottles of coke home, and when we are done with them, we put them in the recycling bin.  Here in Mozambique (and apparently in a lot of other African countries as well), you give the empty bottle back to whoever supplied it to you when it was full.  Usually, the shops, restaurants, bars, or stands that sell the coke to you don’t even let you take it with you.  You have to drink it there and then leave the bottle.

Well during my first month at site, the guy who runs a loja right around the corner from my school let me take a bottle home.  Little did I know, he was under the impression that I knew I had to bring it back immediately.  Meanwhile, oblivious me had not picked up on this apparently intuitive rule.  When I arrived to drop the bottle off the next day, he gave me an overly dramatic tongue lashing about my heresy.  Meanwhile, I was still practically fresh off the chapa and was still trying to grasp Portuguese.  What I heard him say was something along the lines of:  “Bark, bark, bark, you no return my bottle!  Bark, bark, bark, why you do?! Bark, you go, bark, milk and eggs, bark, bark, soda.”  I may not have understood everything, but I got the point.

Anyways, even though the guy sucks, I still would visit his loja after school sometimes to buy a quick snack or a soda.  He has an ice cream machine out front of his store, and even though the ice cream sucks, it’s an necessary evil when the temperature in Mozambique starts to peak.  I always tried my best to be nice and make small talk, but he was never having any of it. 

So finally, I guess he snapped.  I went to his store looking to buy a soda, when out of no-where he starts loudly berating me (literally, I hadn’t even reached his store when he started up) for not understanding Portuguese and never returning bottles on time.  Funny thing is, I haven’t taken home a bottle of coke since he yelled at me in December. 

I was caught off-guard and somewhere between embarrassment as a result of the loud and public accusations, and pride because I was understanding what he was saying.  It felt strange, but the feelings only got stranger with what happened next.  He concluded his tirade by trying to make a strong point about how all white people are terrible because they take and do whatever it is that they want, and then how I wasn’t welcome in his shop anymore because I was a white person and that meant I was going to harm him and his business.

The ironic thing is that he’s a “strangerio” too, he moved here from Somalia.

Taken back by the whole thing, I wasn’t sure how to react.  As he shouted, I began to build a rant of my own, jam-packed with curse words and insults, but that plan was foiled when I realized that I didn’t know how to translate the word asshole.  So instead I took a different route.  I laughed and walked off, feeling good about my actions, but terrible inside because I knew that this meant I would never be able to eat ice cream there again.

Jeez, drama de mais…all over a bottle of coke.

Cabo Delgado Cook Off!

This past weekend was a pretty special one. For starters, we held the first of what will hopefully be many Cabo Delgado Cook-Off Competitions.  Everyone from the province (and then some) brought their A-Game to Montepuez to cook their best dish and have it judged by a jury of their peers.  The rules were simple:  Start at 10am, serve at 4pm.  Oh, and no MSG (Mozambique’s culinary version of Performance Enhancing Drugs).  Plates were judged on the following scale:  1-5 for Creativity, 1-5 for Presentation, and 1-10 for Taste.  Every person votes for everyone else’s dishes, except for your own.  Individual scores were totaled and then averaged to produce a final score that would determine the winner.

The buildup to the event was HUGE, and Mireya and Ana deserve some serious credit for the work they put in to organizing everything and then gathering all the necessary materials so that six teams could all be cooking at the same time.  That, and then they put all 15 of us up in their house too.  Also, a huge thanks goes out to the Montepuez Missionaries, who lent us Fugoes (Charcoal stoves), pots and pans, tools, and some serious bedding to keep everyone comfortable.  I think as a result of them, we only had one or two people sleeping on the floor.

The teams were organized by site, with each site being their own team.  Initially, I was supposed to be a part of Team Montepuez and cook with my site-mates Anna and Mireya, but on Friday night, literally just a few hours before the competition was set to begin, the unthinkable happened, and was thus forced to declare my independence and found Team Montepuez #2:  I received a very unexpected delivery of passion fruit, and lots of it.

My motivation for the break was as follows.  A few weeks back, I found myself alone in my house, with nighttime quickly approaching and a growing pain in my stomach that could only be quelled by depositing a whole of something delicious.  I was feeling a bit experimental, and that’s when the idea struck me:  Grilled chicken drenched in a marinade of pungent African garlic and lip-puckering passion fruit.  I had chicken and I had passion fruit, so why not put it together and see what came of it.  Well, it was good.  It was real good.   When I saw that bag of passion fruit sitting there beckoning me from Anna and Mireya’s table when I arrived to the cook off on Friday night, I knew what had to be done.  These people needed to learn about Passion Fruit Chicken.  And just like that, Team Montepuez #2 came into existence.

The competition was on Saturday, and started out with a pleasant little opening ceremony, introduction of each team, and a hanging of the team banners.  The night before, we each made banners to represent our team.  Mine was unnecessarily inappropriate and violent display of one stick figure decapitating another and an irrelevant quote all set in front of a Mozambique flag that replaced the cris-crossed AK-47 and Enchada with a big Jewish Star.  It was a tasteless masterpiece that was actually quite ironic due in part to the fact that it represented what is probably the most delicious and creative dish I’ve ever made.

We spent all day working trash-talking while preparing our dishes, and when 4pm finally arrived, I was surprised that everyone was actually ready.  As per the rules, each team had a presentation plate for the crowd to salivate over before they were able to actually try a hearty portion from the reserve.  Each team was given a chance to introduce what they made, boast a little, and then talk about what was in it.   Then we feasted.  That was my favorite part.  My least favorite part was the voting that happened after the feast.  That was hard.  And also, it took me away from shoving food down my throat, and I don’t like to be interrupted when I’m eating.

In the end, Team Chiure took home the crown.  Well, it wasn’t so much a crown as it was a goat carved out of black wood that was holding spoon.  So now they get to spend the next year boasting about their victory and rubbing it in our faces.  But watch out, I’ve got a lot of time to come up with something good to make for the next one.  I just hope it’s still passion fruit season…

Here’s a list of what was made and by who:

First Place:
Team Chiure (Eirc and Derek):  Slow-cooked BBQ-style Pork stewed in a tomato base and served with white rice and grilled pineapple.

Second Place:
Team Montepuez #2 (Will):  Grilled Chicken marinated in Passion Fruit and Garlic and topped with a Passion Fruit, Onion and Honey Reduction Sauce (I don’t actually know what reduction means in this context, but it sounded appropriate)

Third Place:
Team Ocua (Lona and Adrienne):  Green Thai Coconut Curry with peanuts and a sweet potato base.

Other Dishes, listed in now particular order:
Team Balama (Rafael):  “Balama Butter” - Homemade Peanut Butter served as a sandwich and spread inside a mini-loaf of house bread with slices of fresh bananas.
Team Montepuez #1 (Anna and Mireya):  Goat-Cheese and Mushrooms Calzones made from scratch
Team Mariri (Elizabeth and Jaime):  Banana and Coconut Stuffed French Toast with Buttermilk Syrup, made using a homemade loaf of cinnamon Irish Soda Bread.

Late Entry, participants arrived too late to enter, made their dish the following day:
Team Macomia (Eryn and Marin):  Cake with homemade chocolate frosting.