The Debut!

Starting now, Amarikan Life will be featuring a series of my grandma's recipes (from the homeland) for some of my favorite dishes. If you don't know her, Maria Fulciniti (aka Nonna) is without a doubt the worlds best cook. She is also 89 years old. Since I'm living in Rochester for the year, and only 7-8 minutes from her house, I have plans to visit her once a week and learn as many of her recipes as I can before she gets too old to remember them or cook them herself! So, read up, try these out and if you like them send me some comments or pictures! I will show her and she will be pleased.


Pasta e' cecere (pasta with chickpeas)

This is a simple recipe to start with (we were able to whip it up in less than an hour) but also a delicious one.

Here's what you'll need:
-1 large beefsteak tomato (Nonna recommends"from the yard")
-Extra virgin olive oil
-Garlic
-Fresh basil
-1 small hot pepper
-1 can of chickpeas (we used "Cento" canned chickpeas imported from Italy. You could also use dried chickpeas but this will add a lot more prep time to the recipe)
-1/2 a pound of pasta (more about this later)

First, we chopped up the tomato and sauteed it in a medium saucepan with olive oil, garlic, and basil for 10-15 minutes. Then we threw in the hot pepper (whole).




All you have to do next is add the beans and continue to cook for another 10-15 minutes. In the mean time, put on pasta water to boil.



Nonna explained to me that one of the most important aspects of this dish is the type of pasta you use with the beans and sauce. We use Anna brand 100% semolina flour pasta imported from Italy (88 cents a pound at Price Right stores). You should try to use imported pasta if you can find it--we like Barilla, Del Cecco, or Anna. Stay away from Wegmans brand/Price Chopper brand if you can.



Additionally, you need to pick a shape of pasta that works well with the dish. We chose "Gnocchi" shape, but other good options would be Tubetini, Elbows, Shells, or Pipette. You need a short, fat pasta with a hole in it so that the sauce/beans will get caught inside and every bite you take will have the appropriate ratio of pasta, sauce and beans. Under no circumstance should you use linguine, spaghetti or any other long, thin pastas.

Once you have cooked and drained the pasta, add it to the beans and sauce and cook them together for 3-5 minutes so the flavors can combine. Serve it hot! Use grated Parmigiano Reggiano if you like.

Here's Nena enjoying the Pasta e' cecere!

Refocusing

I have been failing terribly at writing anything in Amarikan Life this past month (and a half?) since I've been home. I had all these plans to put up pictures and write stories from Malawi. To make a sort-of online scrapbook. Well, I can blame a number of things for keeping me too busy to update: classes, work, car shopping, prepping for interviews....

The real reason, though, is that every time I sat down to write a new blog post, it was too difficult for me to write about my experiences in this format of a short "post." I would need to explain so much background information on Malawian culture, the history of the orphanage, and the many people I met for my stories to make sense, and for you readers to get a true picture of all the craziness that went down in Malawi. So, Amarikan Life is refocusing.

I am going to be writing on a new theme, beginning this weekend, that is completely, totally different from before. Here's a hint, it revolves around my favorite activities: Cooking and eating. Stay tuned for the dramatic change.

Obama!

Everyone here LOVES Obama. The youngest kids on the street go around saying “Obama America” even though they can’t name the president of Malawi if you ask them (it’s Bingu). At the market in Chigamba there is Obama bubble gum (orange and original flavor). When we stop at the gas station, vendors come over to our car trying to sell us “Obama Rolls” (which are actually really delicious sweet breads that taste kind of like challah). The best are the Obama Shitenges, which are the long pieces of material the women here wear as wrap-around skirts or use to tie their babies to their backs. They are usually hilarious cartoons of his face printed in a circle surrounded by stars. I want to buy one but I haven’t been able to find them at the market yet….

Newest developments in my Malawian life are the following:

1) I have been eating the most delicious papayas ever. We buy HUGE, basketball-sized papayas at the market for 30 kwacha (25 cents?) and then squeeze lemon juice on them for ultimate flavor. I've never tasted anything so good. We have also been whipping up bomb guacamole from fresh avocados from the market. Believe me they taste 100% better than avocados in the USA.

2) We are planning a hiking trip this weekend to Mt.Mulanje (the 2nd tallest mountain in Africa). We will be leaving tomorrow morning at 5:30am to take the public transport bus to Blantyre, then continuing on another bus to Mulanje. We will camp tomorrow night at the bottom of the mountain, then leave early in the morning to hike up to a "forestry hut" about a 5-7 hours hike up the mountain. We will stay there Friday night and hopefully explore around the mountain a little bit...We aren't going anywhere near the summit--that would take us at least 3 or 4 days and we don't have the equipment! I'm excited to go though and we are preparing hard boiled eggs and PB and J sandwiches to bring with us..

3) I'm leaving the orphanage on SUNDAY which is crazy to me...I have mixed feelings about leaving-- I am going to miss my little friends here after I leave but I'm also looking forward to coming home and eating a huge bowl of yogurt and strawberries yummmmm!

See you all soon!
I will post many, many pictures after I'm back in the USA because the connection here is too slow for it to work
xoxo

Friday the 13th

Well Hello again

Today our alarm rang at 5:30 am so we could make an escape to Blantyre for the day...Kate and I had to extend our visas at the embassy and Kelley had to come pay school fees for Mphatso and Ernest, two secondary school students who go to school at Matinde in Blantyre. The morning started out GREAT! We went to shop rite, got money from the ATM, then we started to make a plan for the afternoon...

Kelley dropped us off at the Embassy and went to go drive to Matinde with Mphatso. Kate and I went to the embassy (at 11:30 am) and they told us--oops it's lunch time until 1:30 (2 hours, duh), so we walked to Kip's, a pretty western restaurant in Blantyre for some lunch. On our way out of Kip's, Kelley calls us in a panic!!! She has driven an hour outside Blantyre (apparently everyone forgot to tell us that Matinde is actually an hour outside blantyre, not IN blantyre as we thought...such is the Malawian way) and her car has broken down because she tried to drive it on a bumpy dirt road! So now Kate and I are in an internet cafe, waiting to hear from her if she can get back to Blantyre to pick us up....or if we are stranded! After being in Malawi for 3 weeks, this doesn't even faze me. Nothing here goes according to plan, and everything takes the absolute longest time possible. Imagine how long it takes to accomplish any basic task--now multiply that by 4 and that's how long it takes to do it in Malawi! All we can do at this point it laugh.

photos...

Picture Time

Hello!

So I forgot my camera cable and can't upload my own photographs of the kids for you to see, but I'm stealing some from the Littlefield Home computer for the time being so you can get a chance to see what I see every day...

I have been responsible for teaching the youngest children who are in standard 1 (sort of equivalent to our first grade) for the past few weeks...Mostly just the boys come to class because the girls seem to be too busy helping the older women with laundry or caring for babies to attend class. Yes, even first graders are babysitters here. It's not uncommon to see Dija, one of the youngest girl orphans, carrying a baby on her back wrapped in a scarf (called a shitenge) when she comes to class.

We have been doing the alphabet, counting, learning colors and shapes, and most recently articles of clothing. We play a lot of games like duck, duck, goose, hide and seek, and sing songs. I'm teaching them "I like to eat, eat, eat, apples and bananas" as well as "I believe I can fly." It's sometimes extremely frustrating when none of the kids are paying attention or they start fighting but some days one or two kids seem to understand what I'm trying to get across and that makes me feel like I am accomplishing something. It’s definitely more tiring teaching a 2 hour class that you would think!!! After classes are over I am wiped out.

Usually, the kids go to school in the mornings and then we teach them for 2 additional hours in the afternoons. Most of the kids are years behind where they should be in school—we went to their “moving-on” ceremony last week (on their last day of school) and found that most of the kids failed their classes this year and will have to repeat their grade over again. I guess this is pretty common for the district we are in, which is very poor and has the worst schools in the country. Even the kids who did move to the next grade have mostly C’s and D’s on their report cards.

The school our kids go to is a single block, meaning two class rooms with maybe 20 desks in each classroom. What’s ridiculous is that this school serves over 500 kids, so many have to have class outside, and who knows if the kids even show up to school—no one here keeps track. So we hold the additional classes in the afternoons to try and give the orphans at Littlefield a “leg up,” so to speak, since the schooling they are getting is not what it should be. Now that school is out, we will be holding a 2 hour class in the mornings and then doing some fun activity with them in the afternoons—arts and crafts or sports or something. We have been working on a mural in the boy's dorm and I have been playing a lot of soccer with the boys! They school me though they are sick nasty at soccer!!

If you want to read more about the kids, my friend Kelley has set up a super cool blog with bios and beautiful photographs of the kids (She is a professional photographer, or as the kids call it “fat grapher”). The link is http://kelleyriley.tumblr.com

Monica!

Monica. That’s what all the children call me here because they can’t say Marika. The kids range in age from infants to 15 or 16—the oldest kids are away at secondary school (that’s equivalent to our high school). The kids are sooooo cute though I love them all.

So I will tell you the story of one of my little friends named Ibrahm. Last week he came into the main house and was pointing to his mouth, so we look inside and he has a back molar tooth completely rotting out. So this past week we decide to take him to the Machinga district hospital in Liwonde, which is an hour car ride away and is the largest hospital in the district. We also take a few other kids who are sick or need to see a specialist for hearing or glasses. Our transportation is a big pick-up truck and so 4 Americans and five kids pile in the bed of the pick up truck and we take off down the bumpy dirt road that leads from our orphanage to the main highway and Liwonde.

A little ways down the road a man from our village flags us down. His sister is sick and he is wondering if we can take her to the clinic too. We stop and wait for his sister, meanwhile he has transferred a pile of sticks, pots and pans, and a small suitcase into the bed of the pick-up. It looks like he will be spending the night in Liwonde after we drop them off at the hospital. His sister is carried into the bed of the pick-up truck because she is too weak to walk herself. She is all skin and bones, and from the looks of it very sick and she cries as we drive down the road from the bumps and jolts of the truck.

We reach the hospital and I get in the dentist line with Ibrahm. I don’t speak much Chichewa so it is tricky for me to figure out which line to stand in since there are three leading to the one door of the dentist office. I chose one randomly and it turns out to be the right one because we go inside and a nurse is there to write down Ibrahm’s name on a log of patients for the day. Then he gets two novicaine shots in his mouth and we return to outside the office to wait in another line—this one for tooth extraction. The line is about 20 people long and now that Ibrahm has been in the dentists office he knows what's coming. He won't look at me or talk to me and he is PISSED! The dentist shows up and the line starts moving....quickly! After 10 minutes it's Ibrahm's turn and as soon as we get inside the dentists I see why the line is going so fast: The dentist has patients lined up and he just goes from one chair to the next pulling out teeth with his pliers in an assembly line. Ibrahm's tooth is so rotted away that when the dentist goes to pull it out it just disintegrates in his mouth. Ouch! He's a brave little guy though and he barely cries. All I can think is how if it were me in the dentist's chair I would want more than a few novicaine shots and tylenol to help me through a tooth extraction. The dentist tells Ibrahm "see you next week" because he has to have two more teeth pulled. so it goes.

The moral of this story is the kids here are very brave, they don't complain or cry, and are generally very happy-go-lucky. As soon as we got back to the orphanage, Ibrahm was back with his buddies, playing in the dirt and I think he forgave me for taking him to the dentist because later that night we read together during "reading time" and he sat on my lap and fell asleep.

I will try and upload a picture for you guys to see some cute faces: