Beady-eyed souvenirs

It is a well known fact that my dad hates Santa Claus. HATES. Vigorously!

His theory is that "The Santa Claus Religion" was invented as a diabolical plot to distract people from the true meaning of Christmas. Hmmm...Maybe that's why it bothers him so much when I call it "Santa-mas," or when I pray to Heavenly Santa, or when I gave him that ornament of Santa in a manger a few years back.

I have another working theory that maybe Dad believed in Santa until he was, like, 15 years old or something, and the embarrassment when he found out he'd been duped has haunted him for the rest of his life. It happens to the best of us.

It is a well known fact that knick-knacks give me the heeby-jeebies. And yet, I find myself collecting them here and there, especially if they're hideous. Case in point: this knitted finger puppet made by a nearly-blind lady in La Paz, Bolivia, who probably likes to hear the children shriek in terror.

Sponge Bob Squarepants eats brains

That said, my trip to Africa gave me the chance to add a singularly freaky knick-knack to the collection. Not only is it creeptastic in its 3-dimensional beaded glory, but I think it also sheds some light on the true nature of Santa Claus. For example, Santa has Rastafari dreadlocks for a beard. I bet you didn't know that. He also has crab claws for hands. Fact.

I made friends with Willis, the bead artist who made Santa. He makes a lot of beautiful things, too, like beaded sculptures of African wildlife and sweet little guardian angel charms. He carves impressive tribal figurines from solid rock. He paints.

He laughed when I told him that the little beaded Santa will probably give me nightmares, then he said, "Wait. I show you something really scary, then."

High up on a shelf, tucked safely behind a painting, he keeps the biggest, baddest, knick-knackiest nightmare of all:

As I said before, Merry Christmas, Dad!

Tales of a Failed Foreign Foodie

In Bolivia, they have a proud saying, "No comemos para vivir. Vivimos para comer," which means "We don't eat to live. We live to eat." They love their food and they eat for the enjoyment of it as much as for the sustenance. In sharp contrast, the food in Africa holds no joy for me.

The last time I was in Ghana, I was staying up north and totally at the mercy of the kitchen ladies who cooked for our volunteer group. I'd been a little sick, but everyone gets a little sick. Then one day, I saw the kitchen ladies washing slaughtered chickens in the irrigation ditch water (downstream from the people bathing, bathrooming, and laundering), then they left the raw, wet, half-plucked chickens in a heap outside for the remainder of the sweltering, fly-buzzing afternoon. I'm honestly not a picky eater, and I really do like to try everything when I'm traveling, but in that moment I suddenly reached a limit. My mind told me that I wanted to be truly immersed in the lifestyle there, but my colon was terrified by the sight of those chicken carcasses wavering somewhere between dessication and decomposition under the afternoon sun. Thus, my colon and I stayed in my room that night and had a bagel for supper instead.

When I didn't show up for dinner, the kitchen ladies formed a vigilante search party that came and found me, weilding weapons of guilt and plates of chicken (panic sets in), fufu (balls made of boiled starchy yam paste, with a consistency like Play Dough admixed with Gak) swimming in shit-o (oily red sauce, which really does have a pleasant flavor but enough palm oil to grease all 20 feet of your intestines. And no, I'm not kidding about the name.) They sat and watched me like prison guards to make sure I would eat. Cornered and defeated fair and square, I embraced my Salmonella-laced destiny and ate it.

Their mercenary tactics continued for the remainder of my stay. I could run but I couldn't hide. They'd hunt me down. It was a vanishingly rare victory when I managed to dodge their oily red vendetta. Meals became a scheduled ritualistic torment of calorie intake and silent prayers to the food poisoning gods. ("Please subvert the laws of the universe in order to prevent me from getting dysentery. Amen.")

Whenever I found good food on that trip, it was such a big event that I usually took a picture of it! That happened exactly...twice.

Ground nut soup with goat and fufu

(Good, minus the fufu.)

Red-red (black-eyed beans in a mild curry) with fried plantain

and a plastic pouch of drinking water.

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The food on my more recent trip was better. In South Africa, our group went to an awesome traditional restaurant one night (the one with the face painting). We each got something different and then shared it around the table.

Curried crocodile. Looks like pork, tastes like chicken, textured like beef.

Gourd (pumpkin) dumplings in tomato cream sauce, with naan bread.

Sometimes, you just want to skip the jollof rice and starchy pasty banku and the tilapia whose eyes stare back at you as you eat it. Sometimes you want something familiar. That's why, at a seaside restaurant in Cape Coast, Ghana, I ordered chicken nuggets. That's how I found out that "chicken nuggets" there are actually "chicken balls" which are actually a mash of unidentified leftover chicken "bits," veggies, and a heaping scoop of salt, mashed together then breaded and fried.

Exactly what part of the chicken is the nugget, anyway?

But the niftiest new food of the whole trip was this little lovely, which one of our in-country friends picked off a tree on a roadside in Ghana:

Fresh cocoa pod

Fresh raw cocoa is not what I expected at all. It's not that I thought we'd break open the pod and find Hershey bars inside, but I did sort of expect something vaguely chocolate-flavored or at least brownish-colored. Instead, it was full of pulpy white kernels suspended in stickysweet slime. The texture can only be described as alien autopsy, but the flavor was really nice -- kind of banana/pear/mango/mucous.

If you bit into the white kernels, you could see a dark brown paste inside, but it still tasted nothing like chocolate. How or why anyone ever came up with the process of harvesting, fermenting, roasting, sweetening, and somehow 'chocolatizing' those pulpy goobers is beyond my imagination, but I admired their ingenuity and perseverance as I gagged on my cocoa kernel and looked for the nearest place to spit it out.

Delicious.

Rainbow Nation

My week in South Africa went by in a blur of conference lectures, swanky meet and greets, and a few amazing tours. One night, our group got all dressed up for a gala, then realized we didn't actually have tickets to it. But looking on the bright side, that gave us an All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go photo opportunity, so at least you can see who I was traveling with:

Bjorn and Amanda, Me, Dr. Kraft, Jeremy and Alyssa.

Amanda and I had essentially matching black dresses, which gave me flashbacks of the dress code for high school band/orchestra concerts, then subsequent flashbacks of that vein in Ms. Wallace's forehead that would stand out so prominently when the flute section was playing out of tune.

Not wanting to waste the formal attire, we went out to eat at an African restaurant in Nelson Mandela square. They came to the table and did face painting while we were waiting for our food. The result was somewhere between awesome indiginous springbok...and...Frida Kahlo. Never has a unibrow been rendered so nicely.

On our last weekend in the country, some of us went on a tour of Soweto (South Western Township), which was the home of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu before imprisonment on Robben Island. Soweto was originally established as a black slum during Apartheid. Since then, it has struggled with crime, violence, and poverty, but it's becoming more and more of a cultural center and living history site as time goes on.

Nelson Mandela's old house in Soweto

Hector Pieterson Memorial, dedicated to the memory of over 500 people who died in a riot that broke out while school children were peacefully protesting the Afrikaaner government's attempt to force Afrikaans as the language in the education system. Hector was the first person killed; a little boy shot to death by a policeman who was there to "keep the peace."

The thing that caught my attention about Soweto (and Johannesburg at large, for that matter) was the way that the people seem to take the unfair things that happen and coopt them into something meaningful and valuable. For example, these two towers used to be a dirty ugly power plant. The ruling class in central Johannesburg didn't want the pollution in their own neighborhood, so they plopped it in Soweto instead. It was later shut down, and now it's been totally painted over with gorgeous murals showing the history and traditions of the people in Soweto.

Bonus points: they strung a bridge between the towers for bungee jumping. I really wanted to do it, but it was cost-prohibitive (...also, perhaps, life-prohibitive).

Johannesburg Congressional Court (Supreme Court). The building stands on the site of an old Apartheid-era prison, purposefully reusing some of the prison bricks in the construction. They chose the site as a deliberate reminder of the past inequalities and of their current commitment to protect human rights. A reminder that human dignity is fragile.

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We also took a day-trip to a game park in Pretoria. The game park is a pseudo-wilderness with hundreds of acres that have been converted into a safe park where the lions are served pre-killed nutritious meat portions at photo-opportune sites along the tourist roadway, and the zebras are protected, fat, and sassy, feasting on hay in a big, predator-free wonderland range. It's like a dream come true if you happen to be an exceptionally lazy animal who wants all the perks of free-range living but without any of that messy "nature, red in tooth and claw" business. The animals aren't tame by any means, but they're not exactly wild, either.

One very small section of the park is fenced off with little enclosures where the young animals are raised and where the wild birds hang out.

This maribou stork hates small children -- I actually saw him chasing some of them down, with a lethal carnivorous gleam in his beady red eyes.

Not much of a conversationalist, either.

Highlight of the park (maybe of my life):

For about $4 US, I got to play with the lion cubs. They had surprisingly soft fur, and these huge paws. They seemed so sweet and sleepy, it was easy to see why people get lured into raising them as pets. Cuddling with them, it's hard to think they'll be massive alpha predators within a year. On a related note, I came away with all my fingers still attached, which is the true mark of a successful wild animal encounter.

Aaaaaaaaaa! ...frica

I'm back in the US! Safe, sound, and even relatively gastroenterologically intact!

There are scads of stories and pictures, which I'll post over the next week or so when I've recharged a bit, but in the meantime here's my trip summarized into a kitschy numeric nutshell:

Ten airplane connections.

Nine mosquito bites.

(Malaria! Dengue fever! Hypochondriac gone wild!)

Eight interesting travel companions

(doctors...social advocates...an elphant trainer).

Seven eye surgeries

(Aided by some old-school cautery involving a hot poker and an open flame. Not even kidding.)

Six rope bridges suspended a hundred feet above the rainforest floor.

(Plus acrobatics, tree climbing, and my brief stint as a small-business owner selling coconuts, honey, and palm oil in the jungle.)

Five astoundingly skilled cab drivers

(only one of whom hit a stray goat in traffic).

Four wooden carvings hawked by delightful shysters.

("Say me your best price, my sistah!")

Three lion cubs.

(So soft. So cuddly. So happy I didn't get mauled.)

Two phenomally ugly beaded effigies of Santa Claus.

(Merry Christmas, Dad!)

One distressed child rescued from strangulation on the Johannesburg airport's moving walkway.