Eat, Drink

At about 5:15 yesterday morning I heard a knock at my door. (The sun here is full-on at 5, and so I am usually up between 5 and 5:20. The sisters are up and running, for the most part, by 4:30.) It was sister Mabel, who is super sweet and is always making sure that I have everything I need, especially when it comes to food. She makes sure I try special foods, like this snack they have in Kerala, where she is from. It's a chapati, folded with coconut, sugar, cardomom inside, then stuck it in a plantain(?) leaf, and heated on the stove. This morning, she wanted to know if, later for breakfast, I would be wanting a boiled egg.

"Sure," I told her.

At this point she noted that the last time I had eaten a boiled egg, I had not eaten the yolk.

I acknowledged that, yes, I hadn't eaten it, and wondered if I was supposed to explain at this point. I wasn't exactly awake yet.

"Okay, but then save the yolk for her," Mabel instructed me, referring to the woman who comes to cook.

I have no idea how to save an egg yolk for someone else, so I pretended I was too full, and left the egg in its shell, hoping that the woman who came to cook would eat the whole egg.

The messages about food are everywhere here. The sign below was on one of the chalk boards on the thin walls that separate classrooms. (If you can't read it: Bad men live to eat and drink whereas good men eat and drink in order to live.)

It feels like a bit of a sick joke to me to put this on a classroom wall in a refugee camp. Especially after having lunch with one of my colleagues, a fellow teacher who helps me in the classroom, here in his family's hut in the camp, I can't imagine that anyone is living to eat and drink here. That is not to say that the food is not good: the food I have had in the canteen at the refugee camps and that I ate in my colleague's house is what I prefer to eat: perfectly spiced daal, rice, vegetables, noodles, chai--yum! The people here are incredibly kind and hospitable. But, eating lunch at his house was a sobering experience.

Before I start, a few words about my colleague. He's married with two kids, an 8th grader, and I think a 6th grader. His wife is at home. He's in his mid-thirties. He finished his schooling by correspondence with a school in India, and then either Caritas or the UN sent him on scholarship for two years in India for further study. He's deciding between two places in the US to move and worries about what he'll do. Here, he trains teachers, and talks to me about differentiating curriculum and student motivation. He thinks it might be unrealistic for him to be able to do the training to stay in teaching when he resettles in the US.

"This is how we live," he announced to me, after we'd ducked under a rooftop to pass through a small alley floor of perfectly clean and smoothed mud, and stepped two feet into his hut to sit on a raised platform that is also used as a bed. On one wall was a row of hooks, where the family's clothing hung neatly along the entire wall. The slatted bamboo walls and ceiling were mostly covered with newspaper, with larger pictures of film stars I didn't recognize sometimes pasted over them. A small table on one side had a compartment that held his books from his coursework (a British novel, a text on Modern Indian History) which he got out to show me. They looked and felt damp and ancient, though they'd been printed in the mid-2000s. On the floor was a woven mat, covering the mud floor. A few steps away was a room with just enough space for a raised platform. Children on the "street" outside looked at us through the slats in the bamboo. It was too dark to see very well, and at the same time, there was no privacy. I can't imagine how anyone could feel relaxed there, and I felt relief at moving on.

When his wife had prepared lunch, we stepped across the little alley into a room, an eat-in kitchen, which he had renovated at his own expense to be apart from the other rooms, because, as he explained, otherwise the house is full of smoke and it gets in your clothes. He'd also constructed a water pump outside so that they wouldn't have to wait in line for water. He and I sat on a bench, and I faced a small fireplace where they cooked food. His son sat on a chair beside us. Wife and daughter were absent. Above where we sat, I saw where there was some firewood hidden up in the eaves. When I asked about it, he explained that his wife has to go into the forrest and that it is illegal to take the wood, but everyone does. Again, in this room it was dark, and beyond spare. I can't imagine how a family could have a relaxing meal in a situation like that. Twenty years in a kitchen like that is well beyond my ken.

I felt very sad after lunch, and so I was quite happy to be walking back to school with the students in the afternoon. Two very cute girls walked on either side of me. A feisty little one told me she liked to dance, and skipped ahead of me and wiggled her hips for me, which made me laugh. The other was tall and thin and serious, and told me she was moving to Syracuse, NY, and asked me about it and told me about her family. These girls, like the other kids, appear to be well-fed, although some of the school counselors told me that sometimes kids go to school hungry. The WFP (largely funded by the US from what others have told me) provides rations of rice, oil, and vegetables. When you go through the camp, you can see this large, barn-like structure with large sacks stacked inside. The whole operation is surrounded by huge coils of barbed wire. In a less institutionalized road, I've seen little stands where people sell vegetables. Chickens are technically not allowed, but you see them pecking their way outside the huts. One of the IOM workers explained to me that an important part of the resettlement training for the US (right up there with toilet paper) is explaining that Americans eat cow.

Based on my limited experience with food here so far, I think it's safe to say that it's all "good men" around these parts, eating and drinking in order to live. I can understand, though, how these conditions could drive a person to drink.