Cultural Dancers

In Liberia, if a big event is hosted, then cultural dancers area hired. All the ones I have seen have a set of drummers, dancers, acrobats, a beaded instrument shaker (the woman with the red hat, I don't know what its called), and usually a caller, my personal term, who introduces the group.

The drummers bring emotions with their beats and gather up emotions while the crowd waits for the dancers. There is never a need for amplifiers with the drums. The beating of multiple drums layers intensity into the air and makes not beats but music.

The caller tells the group about the county the dancers will represent and about the type of dance or people who live there. Dancers come through the crowd and the show really starts.

I am like a child with excitement every time I see a group. It happens so infrequently that I could be seeing the same group over and over again but don't know it. The drumming is felt in my bones and I have no desire to be anywhere else.

You can see it on the dancers' faces, they don't want to be anywhere else either. I love Liberia.

Intentions of Going Organic

Intentions of being an organic gardener lapsed when faced with sifting through dirt to pick out the trash. Really, there was trash in the dirt from the neighborhood. Plastic bags, metal, shards of glass and plastic bits all littered the soil intended for use in the pots.

Fertilizer gives happy, producing plants and the effort to make it organically seemed lost with the trash.

At least the tomatoes - that might be produced- will be local.

Soon, manual pollination must be done. I feel adolescent whenever discussion the necessity of doing the deed.

Things Forgotten

Times come when writing gets forgotten in the frantic mess of life. Moments to write pass by with only notations in the brain to remember a beautiful moment. Sentences are constructed in the head and disappear as the neurons stop flashing. Without memory, the missing leaves no mark.

And in other times, their is realization of the lost. Pausing in life, a thought dawns that time has past without recording. Now lost, the exact verbs and adjectives cannot be found but the gap exists. Scampering for records, the moment becomes recreated in flashing adjusted to beauty or horror or pain by the neurons lost on their track.

Come back to the routine in consciousness. Hold the words in the head and reach for the pen in the purse to stab them down for time. Stop, and just stop, for a moment while living to make a mention of the wonder that is life. Stop and then move on to reflect on learning and living.

Take out the pen and wear out the ink. Traits of civilizations include record keeping. High levels of society must remember to not forget. Beauty makes the time last longer.

Potato Greens

Leaf

A leaf fluttering on a tree

stopping, no wind can be found

searching, no shaking seen

branches still, air sullen

what makes the leaf flutter in the tree?

I wonder about the leaf in me.

Breaking a Spoon

Sundays are lazy days. They are meant to be a time to recharge and put life back into spiritual order. For some this means going to church, for others it means meditating, walking in parks, spending time with the family and friends, or watching excessive amounts of Food Network.

I irregularly pick the Food Network choice. Today, I should have headed to church.

After 2 hours of watching, I decided to cook. First, I was going to make a dump soup. This is a soup made by dumping canned items into a pot with a bouillon and let it boil. Simple.

Food Network saturated my brain and I could not be "simple".

Using yellow lentils, garlic, and onions, I fried them together and added my only can, canned cream corn. Then, I took out my spices and added and added. Focusing on the yellow color, I added only yellow spices and salt. Then, I put in water and sat it for a simmer.

When it came to tasting, the method of choosing spices by color revealed itself to a disappointment. The soup had flavors I wanted, flavors I didn't want, and I couldn't tell the difference. The solution was a bouillon cube and the old faithful yellow curry powder. Solution found.

Lentils require water, time, and heat to cook. They got an inadequate amount of the first two and excessive amount of the last. Remember the onions and garlic? I remembered them too when trying to stir.

Stirring. Stirring is good. It mixes ingredients together and keeps ingredients from burning on the bottom. Mine were both mixed and burned.

In the process of stirring, I managed to break a piece of the wooden spoon.

Remember, I'm making soup.

Soup

A liquid dish.

A dish that is mostly water.

A dish people eat with spoons.

A dish people can consume like a drink in a rush.

A dish served in a bowl to hold it.

I broke a spoon making soup.

A piece of my spoon cracked off from the tip while stirring soup. My Sunday soup was dangerous. Watching excessive hours of Food Network and then cooking is not advised on Sundays.

Must buy a new spoon on Monday.

Not Rising

I have to accept the failure and appreciate it. My bagels are not rising. It is not a personal thing and I shouldn't take it that way... but I do.

Dear yeast in my dough,

Why do you refuse to rise? I have given you sugar and let you sit in a warm place. Please, I don't mean to rush you but I need to bake you. After an hour of rising time, I saw little difference in size. Why? What did I do wrong?

Please let me know so we can work this out. I don't like the separation between us.

I miss you.

XXX

Exchange out some words in the message , and the text doubles as a letter to a friend after a fight - normally a letter from middle or high school best friends. How history repeats itself, from high school to baking, still amazes and amuses me.

A few weeks and several good and bad batches of bagels later, I stopped baking. Like all phases in my life, I was done with it and needed to move forward. No one moment sparked the end point but seeing frozen bagels in the grocery store might have done it.

My conversation topics changed from the rising of bagels to Egyptian politics and novels I was reading. My friends no longer got plates of bagels or heard about my latest efforts into making blueberry or cinnamon raisin ones. My waistline reduced a bit with the decrease in carbs which made me realize it had increased when I started this tangent. My kitchen was cleaner. I stopped feeling the failure of my non-rising bagels.

What direction would my baking had gone to if yeast worked properly for me? Would I had ventured on to other baking horizons? Or would I, like with the high school friend, have eventually ended up where I am today?

Morning

The sun rises on a new day. Noise in my mind broke me from sleep and thought kept me from knocking around in bed anymore. The brain awoke caught in a loop of thought I could not resolve nor could I ignore. But I was resolved to not give up the day to circles.

Using both the power of yoga and a morning, indulgent milkshake, I finally knocked myself into contentment and onto a straight line of thought. Changing environment effects the patterns of thought and distracts the mind from the thought it got caught on and releases it to other, more pleasant ones.

My poor kitty was happy not to snuggle in bed. Luckily, she benefited from my inability to rest my mind. This meant my, and her, day started earlier. Kitty got what she wanted.

The day was early and she enjoys the priviledge of a safe balcony to explore. Peeping over the edge, the guards at the gate interested her for a moment, then the blooming tomato plant, then the smell of the floor, and then the sounds from the balcony above, and finally the sun rising above. Her eyes caught two birds mating or fighting in the air. Neither one of us has enough knowledge to know which was occurring. She forgot them when they are out of sight and peers down at the dogs near the gate.

They are medium sized, short-haired canines, desperate for attention like children. With the owners away, they look to the guards at the gate to fill the vacant role. Kitty has lost interest in them, like the guards lose interest after a few playful motions with the dogs. She wants to be down where the dogs, birds, and guards are but not really. The safety of the balcony allows her courage to want to be down (but not really).

Morning air tastes sweeter than others. Every morning could be the same, but I am on the balcony to enjoy it and thus feel the newness of the day more. A calming feeling emits from the climate of the night's damp haze yet to burn off. Work not begun and traffic but a coming memory, the peace of the birds chirping rule the air.

I see the sun fighting to bring in the serious day, burn up the night's dew, and heat us all into serious efforts. But I will not head to work today, nor tomorrow, so the sun has little effect on me.

Chicken

Saying the word "chicken" is saying half of a joke.

Please don't think disrespectful thoughts about the animal.

Seriously.

Chicken.

Chicken.

Chicken.

Chicken.

I bet you're smiling.

Few animals evoke such a common emotion with but the name. Is it the feathers? Is it the clucking? Is it how chickens run? Is it the tilt of the head as each step is taken? Someone, somewhere is studying the humor we find in the animal.

So I didn't have a chicken but a rooster in the house. He was brought in a cage to watch a game. He was named "Gary the Gamecock" and that's the last time I will type his full name. As a guest, he was polite, quiet, and didn't share his food nor water. As a talisman for his football team, he failed miserably.

SEC championship for 2010, Auburn Tigers vs South Carolina Game***** finished 56 to 14. He watched the game, he had a chance to cluck or crow, we brought him out, he was brought out to watch the end of the game, and we encouraged him to win. Nothing saved the college football team.

Luckily, his team did not determine his fate.

The chicken walked away free and safe.

Isn't that the punch line for a joke?

Liberian Cherries

For 40 LD (about $0.70 US) I bought two pound of Liberian Cherries. I have now been in Liberia for 3 years, so I'm wondering where these cherries have been hiding.

The thing that is irksome is that in Liberia, most of the produce in the grocery stores is flown in at great expense, and then sold for even greater. I have seen two zucchini for $11.25! Strawberries are flown in and a text goes out to faithful customers. Tomatoes come from Spain and oranges are from South America. In the heart of the tropics, restaurants sometimes serve canned pineapple. They grow here!!!!

With the shipped in fruits, comes an elevated price foreigners rarely question. For the zucchini, asking if the price was correct, the worker who weighed it loudly and vehemently went into an argument about how it was priced correctly. The two zucchini cost half the wages of a maid for a week of work. They cost the same as hiring a a private taxi for two hours and giving the driver a good tip. The zucchini went back into the bin.

So now, out of the blue, local cherries appear (though they were still the appropriate red color). With an outer layer of leaf that needed to be pulled off, but could be done with ease. The taste was a bit tart but still juicy, fruity, and a hint of cherry flavor. Smaller than the normal cherry varieties, these fruits come with an outer husk and provide an experience of flavor, texture, and effort similar to the addiction pistachios invokes. A small bit of work for a reward, and repeatable but in a fruit version.

I found the mysteriously addicting berries at a local fruit stand that catered to locals waiting for transportation. Nothing on the table came in a box or on a plane, all were locally picked and probably from that very neighborhood. I think the owner was so amused by my interest in her products that she forgot to double the price. And at 70 cents for two pounds, I would have happily been the fool to pay more.

So I saw an unusual fruit and asked about it at a stand normally patronize by locals. It was incomprehensible that I had missed cherries in this country. The owner said they were cherries. I kept repeating my question in various forms unable to believe that I had been missing local cherries.

Me:

"What are these?"

"Cherries?"

"Liberia has cherries?"

"Are these cherries?"

"These are cherries?"

A woman in a perfectly made traditional dress, eating cherries unpaid for was at the table. She helped me out with this explanation:

"They are cherries. You know cherries. See cherries."

"You eat them like this. Cherries"

Then she ate another one without paying and handed me one to try. Then I purchased.

See cherries in Liberia.