The World in My Kitchen (18 page)

My next task was to solve the bread problem. I thought I could make bread myself, but I had no oven. Could I make pita on hot stones like I had seen Arabs do in Egyptian villages? But I had no recipe for Arab bread. A few days later, I met a young Swiss engineer who was in Dodoma to teach Tanzanians to use solar power for cooking instead of charcoal. Tanzania’s forests had been decimated over the years, and a reforestation effort had begun. However, Tanzanians were used to cooking with charcoal, and the health of these sparse forests was being threatened.

When I mentioned that I was trying to bake bread, he proposed to make me a solar oven. A few days later, he came over with what looked like a long tube of metal lined with foil and topped with a piece of glass. All I had to do, he explained, was to place the bread on the foil, close the glass oven door, and stick the whole contraption in the sun. Great, I thought, but I didn’t have any idea how to make the dough! A couple from Australia lived next door who had once lived in the Outback. I decided to ask Mary, the wife—a suntanned, lined woman of fifty—for a recipe. She complied and threw in a couple of packets of yeast along with a well-worn paperback cookbook detailing the basics of Australian-style bread. Once I mixed all the ingredients, Thomas kneaded it with a vengeance. It not only rose, but nearly exploded out of my wooden bowl. We shaped the dough into two baguettes, stuck them in the tubular oven, and perched it on a flat rock in the sun. Thomas squatted right by it and waited, staring through the glass. It took two hours for those loaves to bake, and they came out dense and a bit chewy, but we had succeeded nonetheless. From that day on, we baked bread once a week. We played around with the recipe, and the loaves improved over time…but only slightly.

Every morning Thomas and I took a walk through the town, going from store to store, trying to find things to cook. Indian Sikhs owned most of the shops, as well as ran construction companies and exchanged currency with the expatriate community. These shops were invariably dimly lit and sparsely stocked. You might find aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, makeup, toilet paper, potatoes, and the Tanzanian staple
ugali.
One day, as we entered one of the stores whose owner Jimmy knew quite well, I saw a woman leaving with a basket filled with vegetables. I asked the young Indian woman wearing a summer-weight sari that always stood patiently behind the counter if I, too, could have some fresh vegetables. Selma paused and looked at me with curiosity in her face. “Do you have any makeup to sell?” she asked in a whisper. I remembered all the makeup I had bought in New York. “Yes,” I said. “I do.” She asked me to bring it to her the next day, assuring me that she’d sell me some vegetables. That night, after I told Jimmy about my encounter, he told me that the Sikhs ran a clandestine bus from Dodoma over the Kenyan border because Nyerere had officially closed the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Tanzania had magnificent game parks, but most tourists went to Kenya, which had a more sophisticated tourist industry. The Kenyans would bring the tourists across the border to access Tanzanian parks and pocket the fees. This clandestine bus was a great moneymaking scheme for the Sikhs, who sold the vegetables they brought back from Kenya at a premium price or in exchange for things the young Indian women could not get in Dodoma. The next day, I brought the list of vegetables I wanted along with a large selection of American drugstore eye makeup and one of my larger baskets. Selma told me to come back in two days to collect my vegetables. Two days later, Selma handed me my basket. It contained vegetables I hadn’t asked for, but which I was content with: a cauliflower, overgrown zucchini, and a large head of lettuce. We hadn’t had a green salad in nearly a month! Every week from then on, I went back to Selma with eye makeup, blushes, and creams in exchange for more produce. I later befriended Selma and often went to the store to chat with her. She had wanted to be a teacher, but here in Dodoma, her life was very restricted, and the only thing she could do was study by correspondence, which took a long time. “I will have to get married soon,” she said. “I am twenty, and my father will find me a husband, and I will not be able to continue to study.” Sikh women went to temple in groups and met, once married, at one another’s house. I was the first friend that Selma had who was not a Sikh.

A few weeks later, Selma told me that her cousin was getting married; she wondered if I could make something for the dinner her parents were having for the fiancé’s family…something French, she mused. I thought about the liver Philip was giving me every week. Maybe I could make a liver pâté. It turned out that she had a large charcoal oven at home, so I prepared the ingredients for the pâté, assembled it, and took it to her house. We placed it the oven and prayed for the best. Forty minutes later, the pâté looked as if I had cooked it in my own oven in New York. It was a great success at the pre-wedding dinner, and I was in business. I made two to three pâtés a week in exchange for vegetables and fruit. Bartering had become my way of life.

I made very few friends among the expatriates, who let it be known that they didn’t quite approve of my friendships with Tanzanians and Sikhs. They tended to avoid me because I often talked about my new Tanzanian friends and their children. There were a few exceptions, including a couple from Holland who had lived in Dodoma for many years. Margaret, the wife, was an excellent cook and gardener who produced strawberries, spinach, string beans, and radishes and had the best papaya trees in Dodoma. They also had a wonderful garden of local plants and had parrots and even a small monkey. Thomas and I would often visit them for afternoon tea. I think Thomas had a crush on their daughter, Elisabeth, and I loved Margaret’s pancakes. Small, thin, and round, they were a cross between a crêpe and an American pancake. She served them with stewed strawberries from her garden. Thomas and I would wolf down at least six at each sitting. She also taught me to have no fear of garden snakes; we had several in our own garden. Her husband, Gustaf, worked for the government. He was a geologist and was teaching the Tanzanians to find and mine Tanzanite, a sparkling diamond-like stone that, when heated, turns a magnificent purple. Another couple I befriended was Jimmy’s Habitat boss and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Kidhane Alamayehu were Ethiopian and had also lived in Dodoma for several years. Mrs. Alamayehu came often to visit, dressed in pale colored gowns with flowing scarves around her shoulders. She cooked well, serving us spicy chopped beef in a red-hot sauce and vegetables in a green, spicy sauce with
injira,
a flat, soft, pancake-like bread prepared with fermented flour. Her table was always beautifully laid out with exotic flowers and silver cutlery. She also prepared some French dishes. She loved hard-boiled eggs in aspic or served with a mayonnaise or French grated carrot salad. We sat on low stools and ate with our hands, using the bread to pick up the meat or the sauce. I often wondered where she got these wonderful ingredients, but her husband was Jimmy’s boss, and I never dared ask. Often when she visited me, she would sit and question me about America, New York, and French recipes.

Among the expatriates were Italians, Danes, and a large colony of Chinese who ran the local hospital. They would nod when I’d see them in town, but they never spoke to us. I would meet one of them soon enough, when I was bitten on my heel by an insect. It hurt a lot and quite soon my heel became swollen, and I knew I had to remove the stinger. Thomas and I drove to the Chinese hospital, a white-washed building with benches all around the entrance, teeming with Tanzanians who had some ailment or other, often malaria or the flu, which that much later we learned was not flu but AIDS; the epidemic would soon ravage Tanzania and most of the rest of the continent. Because we were foreigners, we were immediately taken to the Chinese doctor. I explained what had happened as I looked around the dirty, fly-swarmed office.
Would I lose my foot from the sting, or would I lose it from an infection because of the dirt around me?
The doctor seemed to read my mind and said, “Go home, open the wound with a clean, sharp knife, and remove the sting. Wash it with alcohol, and take these pills. Antibiotics.”

When we got home, I burned the blade of a Swiss Army knife and looked at Thomas. Could I really ask Thomas to cut my heel open? Thomas was only twelve, but in the last few months, our relationship had changed. He was today more my friend than my son. I had taken him everywhere with me as he spoke Swahili better than I did and could converse with people. I discussed my plans with him and often asked his advice. At night, as we could not leave him alone in the house, he came with us as we socialized. Also, when we read to one another, the books were those we or he wanted to read. Thomas started to discuss books with us, which he had never done before.

I looked in his large blue-gray eyes and asked, “Can you cut my heel and remove the sting?” Thomas seemed quite confident that he could perform the operation. We poured alcohol on the wound, cut the skin, removed the sting, applied antibiotic ointment and a bandage, and hoped for the best. A few days later my wound was closed.

Another month had gone by, and a routine set in. Jimmy left the house very early in the morning and came home for lunch, then would return to the office while Thomas and I would explore our surroundings. Jimmy would return by five, often with his team. In New York, there had been an almost total separation between Jimmy’s office and home. Here in Dodoma, drawings of the new capital were pinned to the wall, and often his associates, tired of eating badly, would come and share our dinner. They discussed the plans or the problems they had with the authorities. Thomas listened and sometimes contributed to the talk because he now knew the city quite well. Thomas had quite a number of Tanzanian friends, was often invited to their houses, and was aware of how they lived.

In the afternoon, while Thomas was away with his friends, I had nothing much to do, so one day I decided that I would write a new cookbook with recipes that I had dreamt of while cooking with whatever I had found in the market. Mainly, I wanted to write a diet book because Jimmy and Thomas had lost weight, but I hadn’t. I had stopped smoking and was wolfing down roasted peanuts all day long.

On a large piece of translucent yellow drafting paper, I wrote a list of vegetables that were not available in the Dodoma market, then a list of meats, and another of seafood I knew. I began to mix and match new, simple recipes and wrote them down on an old typewriter I borrowed from Kahama’s office. Very soon I had a long list of recipes but had to wait until I went back to New York to test them. A year later,
Colette’s Slim Cuisine
came out. The book was illustrated with Jimmy’s drawings of city scenes made out of vegetables, meat, fish, and pasta. The press was kind, the public was not. Could you really lose weight with such scrumptious recipes scoffed one of the reviews in the newspaper? One could; I was the living proof. But judging by sales, few believed me.

Back in Dodoma, August was approaching, and so was Jimmy’s birthday.
What could Thomas and I give him?
There was little to buy in Dodoma, and the roads to Dar es Salaam were flooded. On one of our walking expeditions, we discovered a local stadium where the Tanzanians played soccer. All around the stadium were small ivory shops selling creamy white ivory bracelets, necklaces, and rings that were laid out on black cloth. I asked one of the merchants if he could make a piece of ivory jewelry if I gave him a design. “No problem,” he said. I wasn’t convinced, but I decided to take the risk. I asked John Diebboll, Jimmy’s young assistant, to secretly give me a sketch of the plan of the new capital, and I asked the ivory dealer to carve the design onto a piece of ivory. “No problem! Come in three days; it will be ready.” He told me that it would cost me 100 shillings. I took out my little calculator to see how much it was in dollars. As the man saw it, he said, “Nothing! You give me the calculator, and I give you the carving.” An incredible deal! My bartering was at its peak. On the day of Jimmy’s birthday, I invited his team and a few of our friends. I handed Jimmy the carving, wrapped up just as the carver had given to me, in a piece of rough black cloth. I was as surprised as Jimmy when he opened it: A large concave piece of ivory was carved on one side with a perfect outline of the future center of the capital. He had tears in his eyes when he said, “It is the best birthday present I ever got!”

Sometimes, Jimmy would give me the keys to his jeep. Thomas and I would drive from Dodoma into the bush, visiting small Wagogo villages or sometimes Masai encampments. The Masai were very tall, thin, and always wrapped in magnificent colored cloths with intricate bead jewelry around their necks and long heavy earrings dangling that elongated their ears. The women were also bejeweled; however, their necklaces were larger with more intricate designs. They often had a sleeping baby strapped to their back. It was hard to speak with them since most of them spoke a special dialect. The Wagogos, on the contrary, spoke Swahili. Their houses were very strange. They were rectangular, built of mud and straw, but they were half sunken into the ground, with extremely low ceilings. Dried gourds, used as drinking vessels and cooking pots, hung from the wood-pole rafters. Often the gourds would be decorated and sold at the market. The houses were almost bare: a few low stools, a couple of hammocks, and, in one corner, a circle of large stones—the stove. The Wagogos, although very poor, always greeted us with warmth and offered to share with us whatever drink they had. Their land was bare and difficult to cultivate. There was no industry that could offer some work. Thomas and I got to know a Wagogo family quite well, and between the family’s broken English and our few words of Swahili, we managed to learn a lot from this family. Their older son went to school; his younger brother could not because he had no shoes, and the school would not admit him without shoes. The next day we gathered Thomas’s old sneakers for the young Wagogo boy. Later, we visited the school and were appalled. Housed in a crumbling, white washed concrete block building on a small courtyard, the school had very few books and hardly any paper or pencils.