Beliefs, beef and blowflies.

We have been back a week and I feel as if I have achieved nothing. Well, Virgos always feel they have achieved nothing even when they are flat out but I seem to have done little, yet again, beyond chasing up repairmen and technicians and overseeing repairs and work.

It is too boring to go into detail but the familiar faces have been here again, my team of electricians, Steve, Andrew, John and Mike and they fell about laughing the other day when I said I thought they were here so much they might as well move in. Or maybe they just liked me! That cracked them up even more.

In that two steps forward and one and nine-tenths steps back of Africa, we finally got the circuit breaker board sorted and fitted with names so we knew what was what, only to find, by me putting one and one or one and ten together, as it feels, that whatever was done to the house electrics has made quite a few of our sockets 'unstable' and as soon as we plug anything in, the circuit breakers are tripped.

There has been a lot of running up and down stairs to flip them back on which while a tad tedious, is, I am sure, good exercise for the body if not the mind.

We found the first of these Monday when plugging in my new laptop, which finally arrived courtesy of Hewlett Packard to replace the one I bought 18 months ago which overheats and has a dodgy hard-drive. Snap went the circuit breakers downstairs as soon as we turned on the power switch.

The laundry fluorescent light was doing the same thing and as I write, despite two attempts at repairs, is still doing the same thing. We are in the process of identifying all the now 'dodgy' power sockets so my merry band of electricians can come back next week to fix them. That at least is the theory.

And it would not be a week in Africa without countless power surges, mornings are worse, which turns off my monitor for 20 seconds and then turns it back on. Luckily I don't lose work but it is, to say the least distracting.

And it would not be a week in Africa without the internet working half the time instead of all of the time or half working most of the time where it gasps to pull up a page and then collapses in a heap. I know that weather plays a part and in the Wet there are more problems both with telephone and internet but I gather one downtime of seven hours was caused by vandalism on the line.

You might think, why would anyone vandalise a server or telephone line and I would say, everything in Africa is either valuable or useful or both and you take what you find where you find it. It's a pretty good bet the vandals don't have internet or telephone so why should they care? I mean that last as comment not criticism. Those of us who do not live with and in poverty have no idea how desperate people can become.

It reminded me to get organised and bring back some clothes, courtesy of friends and family, either for the children of Limited's brother who died or perhaps the orphanage. I really was not sure how old Limited was ... Africans like the Asians don't seem to age as fast as we do, at least in looks if not life.

But Limited told me his dead brother's children are grown up and Limited himself has a 16 year old, 13 year old and the little two-year- old I met when I arrived. He grinned when he said to me that she often talks about meeting the Muzungu!

'We call you foreigners Muzungu,' he explained.

'I know you do,' I replied and he looked slightly embarrassed although I am not sure why. Perhaps the Malawians think we know less than we do and I am sure on many counts they would be right.

I suppose they also know little about us and perhaps think we are not interested. I don't pry too much into their personal lives but then I don't do this with people who work for us in Australia. Maybe it is just me but I keep a distance which I think works better. But I am interested in African belief.

I bought a book when I was in Joburg called The Masque of Africa, Glimpses of African Belief, by V.S. Naipaul and I am looking forward to reading it.

I think the more one knows about the beliefs, traditions and myths of another culture the easier it is to understand. Apart from which it fascinates me. Africa in particular has been, and remains, a traditionally superstitious culture. Despite the overlay of religion, often evangelistic christianity, there is at work a deep and often destructive 'religion' of superstition and myth. Again, this is comment not criticism because some of it is sound and the destructive aspects are no more destructive than the superstition one finds in religions of all kinds.

Other than that it has been a pleasant week with something of a social life because some of Greg's colleagues have been up from Perth and others down from the mine at Karonga. We had a buffet dinner at the Sunbird hotel the other night, with them and some visiting analysts and then had dinner at Kumbali Lodge (see pic below of downstairs deck) on Tuesday night. 

They have a beautiful deck downstairs, overlooking the lawns and we sat on the couches and drank gin and tonic before dinner. Malawi Gin is so aromatic and I love it. I don't think it is quite as strong as some other gins which is good since they seem to serve doubles most of the time.

The sounds of night were drenched in a wonderfully reflective full moon as we sipped our G&T.

It is avocado season and our avocadoes are almost ripe.  We have a bumper crop, and while already huge, they are apparently still growing. Some have fallen from the tree and we have allowed them to ripen but they have a slightly watery taste as opposed to the creamy indulgence of a properly ripened avocado.

Photo: Kumbali Lodge restaurant.

Anyway, Kumbali decided to make the most of avocado season and did a Mexican night. The chilli con carne was much too chilli for me in that numb lips when you eat and wishing something else was numb the next morning, way. But it was tasty even as it was ultimately testing.

They served an entree in a glass with salsa at the bottom, avocado puree on top and finished off with sour cream. Freshly made nachos came with it and it was delicious although a bit on the large side.

Later, someone called us outside to look at the halo around the moon. We stood on the lawn, in the dark cool of night and looked up at the brilliant moon surrounded by a rose-coloured haze.

'Armageddon?' said one guest.

'Who knows,' said another.

'A volcanic explosion somewhere,' I ventured.

'Best place to be if it is Armageddon,' we agreed,  having noted the well stocked bar and comfortable chairs on the verandah.

It wasn't Armageddon of course and the only 'blaze exploding' that night was the chilli in our Mexican dinner.

I made avocado soup last Saturday when my Danish neighbour came over for dinner. She had been on her own for a week and Greg had gone up to the mine so I invited her over.

Luckily I decided not to do the 'generator dance' because I could not be bothered with a repeat of my last dinner where it kept shutting down and we had to keep going out to reboot it. I opted to cook some beef fillet to have cold and to make potato salad. I turned on the oven only to find it did not work. The cooktop did but not the oven.

Why was I not surprised? The electricians had been here while we were away to re-do the circuit breaker board and clearly something had been wrongly wired, not wired, or just forgotten.

I tracked down Manuel who has been doing all this work for us and he said the electricians would come over to fix it. They did, about three hours later and surprise, surprise, they  discovered that they had forgotten to re-wire the oven after they worked on the board. Why was I not surprised?

Photo: One of our avocadoes on the tree in the garden.

We actually get really nice beef fillet here from Foodworths and given that the chickens taste as if they have been soaked in engine oil and there is no lamb, apart from the carcases hanging by the side of the road on the way to the airport, the menu options are limited.

I know some of the Christian missionaries do buy this meat because I have seen them stop on the way back from the airport but they have God on their side. It beats the skinned rats which were sold along the roadside when we lived in Zambia but I am not adventurous enough to buy roadside meat with its 'blowfly coat.'

So beef fillet is a staple for us. I don't know why but it is actually quite inexpensive. Maybe it is buffalo but I don't care. The fillet is also great cold and avoids any cooking issues arising once guests arrive. I made some potato salad and Birgitte brought a salad of mango, apple, walnuts and red lettuce.

The avocado soup I made is so easy. I found the recipe online. Puree avocado with spring onions and garlic and a little lemon juice and then add chicken stock, salt and pepper, some cumin powder and thin with a little ice water. You could also add fresh chilli but I opted not to. I had some coriander looking a bit limp because Fred the gardener had clearly forgotten to water it while I was away, but still alive in my pots on the verandah but I would have liked more. I had to top up with parsley which is not the same.

Cold soups are great and I did a tomato and capsicum cold soup on Wednesday night when Greg invited three of his colleagues home for dinner. I also cheated and did the beef fillet and salad again. I had people working on things in the house all day and did not have the energy for generator issues, should they arise. By the time guests were due I was ready for my second chardonnay!

Apart from the fact that I have not been outside the house - Greg did the shopping on his way home from work - it has been a good week. I have been busy with my writing and have done some submissions for novels and poetry which may drop into the great cosmic ether as such things often do, but who knows?

The cake and biscuit tins are topped up and I have come up with a great apple cake recipe after stuffing up the one I was following and having to improvise. The recipe had pureed apples in the middle and sliced apple on the top, but, distracted as I was by the ever changing energy environment in which I live, I started creaming sugar and butter only to realise that the cup of brown sugar was meant to go in the water for the apple puree and the cake itself needed only half a cup of caster sugar. Bugger.

But all was not lost and I have been cooking long enough to know the science of it so I added more butter, flour and milk and made my cake with sliced apple in the centre as well as on the top and it turned out beautifully. The brown sugar actually gives a caramel taste to it and I will use it again.

And I have just cooked what looks like and probably is, half a bucket of rice. Greg spotted the black dots in the two jars of rice. Locally bought of course. The Basmati and Arborio, both imported are weevil free but my two lots of Malawi rice were riddled. I used to have the same problem in India particularly with flour, even when we kept it in the fridge and had to sift my flour before baking but it has not been such an issue here. I did buy some white dried beans which, upon cooking, I discovered were full of weevils and weevil tunnels, but, until today, my life has been weevil free.

So into the pot with water went the rice for a sluice and a soak and a rinse with what looked like hundreds of weevils floating to the surface. I don't like to kill things, even weevils, but if I had left them in it would have been black rice not brown. All that protein, Greg said, watching the poor things float on top of the saucepan.

It would have been high in protein of course which, apparently, according to studies done in the UK is what keeps the vegetarian Indians alive. It is an irony of course because they refuse to kill living things and yet only live because their food is full of weevils. This fact was discovered some years ago when Indians living in the UK, eating the same diet, had problems with lack of nutrition. The missing ingredient in food produced outside of India was weevils!

I have put a rice pudding in the oven with the now weevil-free, cooked rice and will use the rest to make salad and Hopping John - black-eyed beans, bacon, and of course rice. We and Limited and Andrew will probably be living on rice for a week. Greg may well be pleased that he has a few days at the mine because he is not a 'rice-boy' apart from rice-pudding.

Life in Malawi muddles along in its own way although I think the fuel shortage has finally been resolved. At least for now. It seems to be a recurring event due to foreign exchange issues which leaves a dozen tankers lined up at the Mozambique border waiting to come in.

I gather there was something of a protest by Malawians this week about the fuel problems and you can hardly blame them. Queuing for countless hours to fill the tank of your car must get tedious. It is something which we in the developed world rarely face. Then again, most things in the Third World take so long that it is hardly surprising development is so slow. What we can do in the West in a day can take a week or month in places like Africa.

For all the criticisms of democracy it still works better than any other system and by that I mean real democracy where the people have free and fair elections and where corruption is at a minimum not a maximum. Too often those of us who have it take it for granted.

BELOW: The Orange breasted bush-shrike. Is that a mosquito in its beak? Probably not but I live in hope.

Beef, biscuits, belief and weevils.

Who would have thought you could wash Anzac biscuits; who would have thought you would have to? 

In that way of things in new places I made my first batch of Anzac biscuits and lined the tray with baking paper, which, I discovered, is not the baking paper one finds in Oz. This baking paper, more of the old-style greased paper, stuck to the bottom of the biscuits. I tried scraping with a knife, with some success; pondered eating the biscuits and not worrying about consuming a bit of paper at the same time and then decided to wash and scrape them with a knife.

Luckily this batch of AB’s turned out well; hard and crunchy so in the main it was a success. I lost one which crumbled like a tea-dunker but returned the others to the oven to dry out and think I can claim success. Needless to say the second batch went onto the tray sans paper!

We had a quiet weekend with yet another foray to Shoprite, where, prayers being answered perhaps or more focus and less confusion (I opt for prayers answered) there, in the middle of the fruit and veg. section was a rack FULL of nuts and dried fruit. Nirvana. So much for being a nut-free zone; if it ever was it is no longer. Almonds, pine-nuts, cashews, walnuts, pecans, pistachios .... a veritable nut frenzy. Not only that I found sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds and poppy seeds along with dried apricots (to make jam) and a good selection of South African dried fruit.

So what is not here? Well, good baking paper for one thing although perhaps that also exists and is yet to be found. Otherwise all is good and the pantry is well stocked. My recipe repertoire is limited without a mixer or food processor but a one-mix chocolate cake turned out fine yesterday and Anzacs are an easy mix. So too are gingernuts which are next on the list.

LEFT: Anzac biscuits minus the greaseproof paper.

We took another turn around the Italian deli in the Mamma Mia compound and bought gelato, fetta in olive oil and freshly baked crusty bread.  The vendor gaggle was at the gate again.  A young man with a deformed leg was selling what looked like hand-painted postcards; I had to buy a couple and think I will have them framed next time I am in Oz. They are quite prettily done.  

And the strawberry sellers were back with a vengeance but this time three not four. I tried to get away with only taking two trays but the pleas grew more insistent and I finally relented only to be showered with wishes for God’s grace and good luck. All of which never goes astray and may well be of more use than the strawberries.

A tray of mulberries and a hand of bananas were next but I said no to the bunch of freshly picked asparagus, delicious as it is, because there was simply no room left in the fridge. So it is strawberries and mulberries for breakfast and I have enough mulberries put aside to make a couple of pots of jam.

We had another power cut last night but I had made rice and bean salad and a green salad and decided to cook the South African coiled beef sausage early. This time the cooking was pretty much done by the time the power went out so lights out, candles lit and hopes that the inverter might let us watch the television programme we had on through to the end. We had the power back within two hours which was something of a surprise.

I suspect the food obsession amongst expats is sourced in the desire for familiarity and comfort. The thing about familiarity is that it doesn’t necessarily breed contempt but it does breed familiarity and that which is familiar is comforting; it creates a sense of the known, of belonging and the illusion of certainty. It is why, I am sure, that while immigrants give up much to make a new life, they rarely, if ever, give up the foods of their homeland.

The latest news on our goods is that the cargo ship is at Port Elizabeth and should be in Beria in Mozambique within a week. From there it is two weeks to Lilongwe and three days to clear customs. Which means, with any luck, probably a lot of luck actually, we are looking at the first week of October for setting up the house.

LEFT: Port Beria in Mozambique.

The bad news is that the House Mosquito failed miserably last night and two colleagues made their way into our bedroom and under the net. We both woke in the night to a buzzing but did not find the culprits until the morning. Note to Self: spray room at night before lowering net.

There’s a little bird outside which makes the sweetest sound; ’whiiiiiip, whiiiiip, whiiiip!’  and there is another one  which seems to say: ‘what are you doing, what are you doing.’  I wonder if it is the brown-grey bird with the brilliant rust coloured breast which I see hopping through the garden beds?  I just hope the local bird diet is high in mosquito!

God I love the net. A short search and it's a good bet my warbling friend is an Orange Breasted Bush Shrike!

I gave Limited – always have the temptation to write Ltd., but he signs himself as Limited so I feel honour-bound to hold the line – some cold meat and the rest of the rice and bean salad this morning. He must have thought the piece of steak was a bit suspicious because he told me that he and Mbwe do not eat pork. I asked him if it was religious and he said no.  Perhaps it is a belief, also taken up by Jews and Moslems as a given, that pork is not safe; that it is ‘unclean.’ This was a very sensible view thousands and even hundreds of years ago given the propensity of pigs to disease but not so much in the modern age.

Although I still would not eat pork in India for that very reason and perhaps it is not a good idea to eat it here either.  Much of Africa is not in the modern age. Not that I have seen any pork; nor lamb for that matter. And the beef which is on sale has a very strong smell. It is not ‘off’ but it is gamey. One American expat holds that the gamey smell is because the beef is free-range and grass-fed (as opposed to the American grain-fed and crammed into pens approach) but most of Australia’s beef is grass-fed and free-range and it does not have a gamey smell. There has to be another reason. It could be the variety of grass eaten I suppose.  Or it could just be very, very, very well aged!  The smell at the supermarket is on the verge of overwhelming. Whatever it is I don’t particularly like it. But it tastes okay once cooked. I tell myself that the smell means it is rich in minerals and extremely good for me.

 The chicken is fine and the fact that the de-feathering process seems to be a tad cavalier suggests they are local and possibly not factory-produced. That is a huge assumption however. The chicken we ate in Angola came in frozen from Brazil; no doubt from the worst of factory farming. But beggars can’t be choosers and sometimes you can have too much information.

Then again, historically Malawians have not eaten a lot of meat. The Nyasaland missionaries at the end of the 19^th century recorded that bananas were the staple food and that villages would be surrounded by acres of banana plants; that is until Arab slavers decimated the countryside and wreaked havoc upon normal life.

ABOVE: Malawi cattle grazing in the wild.

Millet, peanuts and maize were cultivated and while cattle were plentiful the meat was rarely eaten. Maybe it was ‘smelly’ meat even then? The people also kept goats, pigs and chickens but there were so many superstitions regarding meat that it came a long way down on the menu list. Chicken for instance was said to make women infertile. And while wild game abounded there were restrictions upon who could eat which animal. It all sounds like a lot of hard work.

But Lake Malawi, offered a wealth of fish which probably made it easy to avoid meat and this formed a huge part of the diet along with peas, beans, rice, pumpkins and sugar-cane.  Fish stocks these days are sadly depleted although the government has plans to re-stock the lake and monitor over-fishing.  Catching fish is less dangerous than catching wild animals. Cattle of course have long been the ‘currency’ in Africa and would be killed only for a very special event.

Still talking food – lasagne for tea. I found the odd weevil embedded in the pasta. By the look of it they chewed their way in and died of exhaustion. Unless they were in the Italian flour in the first place which I doubt.  Do I bother to excavate them or regard them as a protein bonus?  I’m opting for protein bonus at this stage of the game; after all they just look like specks of pepper and won’t be identifiable at the stage of eating. I ate more than my fair share of weevils in India so they are the least of my worries. To echo Russell Crowe's character in The Far Side of the World: 'it's the lesser of two 'weevils.'

LEFT: Weevils, one of the food groups. They taste better than they look.

There’s a story about weevils which always amused me although that is probably not a sensitive response. I read some years ago that a study in the UK found Indian emigrants frequently suffering from malnutrition.

They could not understand why this was so when they ate the same things in England that they had eaten in their homeland.

All was revealed however when it was found that English ingredients, not surprisingly, were lacking in one crucial thing; weevils.

Vegetarian Indians were able to survive on their diet because it was laced with protein in the form of weevils! The Gods do play sport with us!

All that paranoia about being good Hindus and Jains and not killing living, moving things and millions had died in the name of dinner! Some Hindus and Jains will not eat food which grows in the ground, like potatoes and onions for instance, because of the carnage which results from digging them up; countless billions of tiny creatures die in the process of harvesting.  Although I would have thought there was a pretty high death rate picking fruit or gathering foods grown on top of the ground. But let's not allow reason into the realm of belief; particularly religious belief.

The truly orthodox do not drive in cars or fly in planes because of the trillions of living creatures squashed or  sucked to their deaths; the truly, truly orthodox do not wear clothes for the same reason.

I was always struck by the fact that such rigid adherence to belief ignored the fact that every time we rub our eyes, or run our hands through our hair, or wipe our bums for that matter, we are mowing down  zillions of microscopic but still living, breathing and moving creatures.

But human beings have the unique capacity of holding two utterly conflicting beliefs at one and the same time. There's a lot to be said for moderation in all things. I did count the number of weevil carcases in my pasta and can state quite categorically, the presence is moderate. It might be better though if Greg reads this after he has eaten and not before. He does check in on the blog from time to time but I am probably safe since he has been busy getting the car filled with diesel. We have had a shortage the past week and the queues trail all over Lilongwe.

Appreciate what you have when you have it and take nothing for granted is the lesson around here.