Zemi Helmets: The Finished Product

The stickers have arrived and we’re up and running. Jaren is tooting around Tchaourou with a giant “W” on the back of her casque, and Steve has instituted a new policy of giving himself a Buckeye on the 21st of every month served (we landed on the 21st).

The Things We Miss

While our lives here are full of new adventures and interests, we are not so blind as to realize that life marches on back home for the ones we love. In the past three months we’ve missed weddings, births, bar mitzvahs and all sorts of other happy events. Its been tough, pretty much the hardest part about being here, and luckily we’ve been able to rely on correspondence from friends and family to stay relatively in touch.

But there is also this. As of this morning, the Red Sox are off to the World Series against the Rockies, who were a sub-.500 team the week we left and lost a series in Denver to the lowly Royals the week before our wedding. The Patriots are undefeated and this year’s edition may be the best team of the dynasty so far. The Celtics have completely reinvented themselves with the Allen and Garnett deals and are among the title favorites in the NBA. And not only was this the year that Washington and Ohio State went head to head in college football (thus dividing our young household down the middle), but now the Buckeyes are the top ranked team in the country.

Somehow we get the feeling the sports gods are taunting us.

Les Freres Super Mario

Example #287 of globalization in action. Walking through town the other day I heard a sound that I could immediately identify on its own but refused to believe I was hearing in the current context. It seemed to be coming from a tin roof structure walled off from the street by an oily sheet, surrounded by a whole lot of people doing nothing. I figured it was a figment of my imagination, an accidental confluence of audible inputs that brought back a childhood memory. Then I heard it again from the tin shack, unmistakable for any American between the ages of 20 and 40 – Mario in a warp tube.

Forgetting everything I was supposed to be doing at that point, I made a direct line for the shack where I found two boys with a beat up TV playing the original Super Mario Brothers. Turns out there is a cottage arcade industry here, kids being charged 50 francs (about 12 cents) to play until they hit game over. Well, with 50 francs on the line I can assure you these kids play as if its life and death, knowing absolutely every nuance to the game – secret stars, level warp, invisible coins – and do not let anything distract them from the mission at hand. Not even the white man speaking broken French in astonishment that here he is in West Africa going through an unbelievable bout of cognitive dissonance can draw their attention.

And you know what, fair play to the person who figured out he could make some francs as long as the power doesn’t go out. Now if I could figure out the Nagot for Super Tecmo Bowl…

Food with a Capital “F”

While we’ve made an effort to update the Food File (see right), we think it’s necessary to say a few words about the general food situation.

The classic images of famine many of us associate with Africa don’t necessarily apply to here, but that’s not to say malnutrition isn’t an issue. Put in the simplest of terms, the culinary options are boundless and only limited by the unyielding stubbornness and/or indifference of the locals. We eat very well while just about everyone else eats the same three meals every single day. They choose to eat Pate (essentially Elmers paste, corn flour suspended in boiled water through 2 solid hours of stirring) with a primarily tomato paste sauce seasoned with powdered chicken stock and palm oil. This stuff is just awful, fills you for the sake of filling you. The Beninese also eat that and In'game Pilet, which is only a slight improvement over pate as it was at least a tuber to start with. The gigantic, furry potato that is an In'game, when petrified in a large wooden mortar by two mamas using pestles the length of golf club. Usually served with the same red sauce as well as a couple of pieces of fried wagashi cheese (ricotta with the water -- and flavor -- pressed out).

That said, we're eating well seeing as how we know what we're doing a bit in the kitchen. Our first week here in town Steve had a bunch of time on his hand and the 1964 edition of the Joy of Cooking, which he proceeded to read cover to cover. It was a great primer for cooking here because a) it traded in ingredients at there most base level and b) there were far fewer of the kitchen gadgets available so the tools involved are available locally.

Overall, eating tons of fresh tropical fruit, using the In'game in the millions of ways one uses a potato, and the meat is so fresh I have to wait for the cow to finish bleeding out before I can order (making things better, because they over-cook everything, all meat is priced the same. 1400 francs for a kilo, regardless of cut. Put another way, we can get an 8oz filet minion for under a buck.)

All in all, we’re having the most success with meals that actually come from our traditional family recipes. With the ingredients available, most traditional Jewish and Norwegian food can be reasonably replicated.

Things We Never Thought We’d Get Used to Seeing

Things We Never Thought We’d Get Used to Seeing:


- A commercial truck with 20 horned steers barreling down the highway, with men in hammocks suspended above the cattle.
- Straight men walking down the street holding hands.
- Children bathing in a puddle, and just being glad they’re using soap.
- Buying a bottle of peanut oil in the market (already in a used beer bottle), only to have the woman selling it pouring it into a thin black plastic bag.
- Watched one child slap another on the head with a closed pair of scissors and thought is “Wow, where did they get scissors?”
- Beef being sold not from a butcher counter but rather from a tray on a woman’s head (not where we get ours because of Steve’s budding friendship with our local abattoir).