Black Bird: September 2012

Did you know that there are over 6,500 types of sweet potatoes and that what we call yams in the States is actually a type of sweet potato?

For the past week and a half I have been on the quest to make a sweet potato pie. The reason for this is because expats out here enjoy celebrating US holidays and every time I am invited to an expat party I never bring anything. So I have decided that for Thanksgiving I will make a sweet potato pie. Yet I am a bit of a perfectionist. Even though I have two months until Thanksgiving, I wanted to try to perfect the sweet potato pie early on. Besides being a perfectionist I needed to know, before November, if I could get all of the ingredients in Uganda and if I could find the right sweet potatoes. Finding the right sweet potatoes is when it all started to get crazy. Hence the purpose of this blog post. Life is like a sweet potato… you never know what you're gonna get.

I remembered a couple of years ago I was on my first quest to find sweet potatoes to make a sweet potato pie. I was near PCC (a natural/organic grocery store in Seattle) and decided to stop on in to buy the sweet potatoes. Yet to my surprise I saw sweet potatoes that were a lighter skin color than the brown/red ones I am used to not. In fact the brown/red ones were labeled yams. I was confused since the recipe called for sweet potatoes, but the ones I saw labeled sweet potatoes were not the ones my family used. So I bought the ones labeled sweet potatoes and not yams. I got home that night and called my aunt and told her about the sweet potatoes I bought. She informed me that I needed to buy the yams instead. I returned the sweet potatoes and bought the yams instead. That Thanksgiving, my pie turned out like the ones my family makes.

Let’s fast forward to Wednesday September 12^th 2012. I had planned to make a sweet potato pie this past Saturday (yesterday) at my co-worker’s, Rachel, house. I was ready to do my shopping for my ingredients. The recipe is pretty simple and I found the eggs, sugar, butter, and milk (Rachel already had the cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla) at the grocery store. The only thing the store didn’t have was the sweet potatoes. This meant I had to go to the market. Markets out here are like Seattle’s farmers market, but everyday of the year. As I was approaching one of the vendors to ask about sweet potatoes, I remembered that I actually needed yams because it was yams, not sweet potatoes that were used in the pie. As I went up and asked her about the yams, she cut one in half and showed me that the yam inside was white with purple flecks. She told me that once you cook the yam it turns purple. I knew this was not what I needed so I decided to head back to my office and research the correct yams I needed. I got back to my office (7:30pm) and see that my co-worker Jones is still there. I told him about my issues with finding the right yams for my pie. He ends up telling me how yams are really starchy and not dry. This throws me off and I turn to google for my answers.

YAMS ARE NOT SWEET POTATOES AND SWEET POTATOES ARE NOT YAMS! In fact, they are not even in the same family! Yams are very rare in the US and when we say yams in the US we are actually saying sweet potato. Click to learn about sweet potatoes. This explains why I was so confused at the grocery store in Seattle. When they advertised "sweet potatoes", they were advertising a different type of sweet potato. When I saw the name “yams” right next to the sweet potatoes, they were just advertising what people know to be yams when in fact they are sweet potatoes.

Okay, I hope you are still following me. So I showed my Ugandan co-workers the type of sweet potatoes I wanted to buy…

Margaret informed me that the sweet potatoes I want are grown in the country. She knew this because they are from her home district of Sorti. After much debate about where I should go to buy the sweet potatoes, I was informed that I should go into Kampala to the Nakasero market to find the potatoes. I had the place, I had a map (even though I have been to Kampala before) and I knew to ask for sweet potatoes that are yellow inside. Yellow inside? I considered it orange, but I was following my co-workers advice.

Since I decided to take Friday off, I headed into Kampala around 11:30am. I got on a bus and sat patiently waiting for the bus to drop me off close to the market. While I was on the bus I struck up a conversation with a lady named Susan about her braids. We ended up talking the whole way into Kampala. She was going into the city to buy a dress for her two-year-old niece whose birthday was last weekend. As I was about to reach my destination she informed me that she would go with me to the Nakasero market to make sure I get the right potatoes. I was starting to like this new friendship. We went into the market and found the ladies who were selling the sweet potatoes. She talked to them in Luganda and one of the ladies cut one of the sweet potatoes open to show me the color. The color was yellow, a light yellow. Susan informed me that the sweet potatoes were from the Sorti District and they were yellow, just like I wanted. The issue was that even though they were the color I asked for, they were not the ones I needed. They were only 2000 shillings for 3 of them (less than a dollar), so I bought them.

I eventually made my way back to my office and showed Margaret my sweet potatoes. She looked at them and said, “You got the yellow ones. The orange ones must be out of season. But these will work.” Sigh. So I got the wrong sweet potatoes. But I decided not to be deterred. I researched the sweet potatoes that I got and found that they are sweeter than the orange sweet potatoes, but have less flavor. My director’s wife, the couple have been here for almost 10 years, told me that when she wants to get the texture and taste of sweet potatoes from back in the States, she mixes the sweet potatoes here with pumpkin. I decided that on Saturday I would make two pies: one with just the sweet potatoes that I found and another that is half mixed with pumpkin. So here is the journey…

The sweet potatoes I bought...sigh...

As the potatoes are currently being boiled, I had to make the crust.

The sweet potatoes out of the water. Kind of steamy.

Mashing the sweet potatoes. Definitely more yellow than ever being close to orange.

All of the ingredients mixed together

Rolling out the dough for the crust

The all sweet potato pie in the oven

The half sweet potato half pumpkin pie before it went into the oven.

The end result of the first pie (the all sweet potato pie). Oh I formed the crust for this one. Beautiful eh?

The half sweet potato half pumpkin pie. My co-worker Rachel formed the crust for this one. I need to practice my crust making skills.

Conclusion: The all sweet potato pie was alright. I forgot to mention that the potatoes were really dirty when I bought them. It seems as though some of the dirt made it's way into the pie (I was the only person who could tell though). The pie kind of tasted like the sweet potato pie back at home, but different. It turns out that my co-workers really liked the half and half pie. They even went back for seconds. The half and half pie was more moist than the all sweet potato pie. Sweet potatoes out here are more drier. Here's the thing, I didn't like sweet potato pie right out of the oven. Today I was able to try both of the pies cold. Last night I couldn't even finish the half and half pie. Today I ate it rather quickly. I also enjoyed the all sweet potato pie more today. In the end, I am unsure what I will do for Thanksgiving. Part of me wants to get canned sweet potato shipped to me for Thanksgiving. Yet another part of me wants to make the pies again and cool them overnight before Thanksgiving. This was such a journey for me, which is why I wrote about it. I guess my biggest decision is if I should adjust to my surroundings, which means my taste buds have to stop comparing to food at home. Or do I still cling to what I know? Since I'm out here for at least until the end of June, I guess my taste buds have to change.

This past summer I read the book “The Color Purple.” In the book the color purple represents God’s way of show people that he loves them. While I was in Rwanda I toured a church where 45,000 people were massacred in. Wrapped around various posts around the church grounds were purple ribbons that represented mourning. In fact, because of the genocide purple has become the national symbol of mourning. I’m still debating if what I read about the color purple and what I saw in Rwanda is ironic or not.

When I entered Rwanda I entered into beauty. I did my best to capture it with pictures. I am trying to do my best to describe it with words, but the beauty of Rwanda is better seen in person. Yet in my effort in trying to describe the beauty that is Rwanda I default to Ansel Adams who said, “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” Here are my inadequate images of Rwanda’s landscape.

As soon as you enter Rwanda you come across this amazing landscape. Rwanda truly is the land of a thousand hills. Besides the beauty of the country, one can see how developed and orderly the country is. It is illegal to bring in or possess plastic bags (like the ones we have in grocery stores) since they litter the streets and harm the environment. Every car has to pass a safety and smog check each year in order to be on the road (something definitely not found in Uganda). The roads are nicely paved with clean streets. Boda-boda (motorcycles) drivers can only hold one passenger and they are both required to wear helmets (in Uganda helmets are rare and boda-bodas sometimes hold up to 5 people). Another order that has been put into place is mandatory community workday for all Rwandans once a month on Saturday. This is an old tradition that has been made law after the genocide in order to build community. Basically community workday consists of helping a neighbor, church, organization, etc with a task they cannot do on their own. With my staff and students we got to participate in this day. We moved rocks into a room to create a floor foundation in a newly developed building at the Anglican guesthouse we were staying at. I liked this ideal of a mandatory community workday. It gets everyone mixing and mingling with one another. I also enjoy the ideal of coming together for a common goal.

A group shot after moving rocks for 2+ hours. American and Ugandan university students along with a few of my staff members.

This time around going to Rwanda was very different for me. My eyes and ears were open more to the surroundings. As written earlier, I visited a church in Nyamata where 45,000 people were killed and buried. The Kigali Genocide Memorial museum is also the burial site to 250,000 people which I also visited. What made going through these sites extremely hard was that one of the Ugandan students is a Rwandan and most of her family was killed during the genocide. She is probably 5-7 years younger than me and has already experience more death in her life than I will ever have. Yet Rwanda didn’t end on a sad note for me. We were able to learn about the reconciliation that is happening in Rwanda. In a complicated way it is now illegal to identify as Hutu or Tutsi. Everyone is Rwandan. Back to reconciliation, perpetrators now live next to, work, and help out those they victimized. It’s interesting, many of the victims have found a way to forgive those who have destroyed their families and have learned to cling to God in a way that I don’t. In a documentary I watched about Rwandans forgiving one another one lady said if God forgave the perpetrators she needs to forgive the perpetrators also. Another lady said that she still needs God even though His people are the ones who killed her family. There is a sense of resilience there that I’ll never fully grasp.

In the end the color purple can represent both God’s love and mourning. They are two things that are being reconciled. I still respect the color purple no matter what it represents. My time in Rwanda was great. Even though it is a quiet country (I think it is quiet because the genocide was only 18 years ago and many people are trying to move past 1994 and find their joy again), a small country and still trying to find its way in the world, I found that I did not want to leave Rwanda. You know when you just want to be part of something good you just want to stay put to see it all unfold? Yeah, that’s how I felt. So that is all I have to write about Rwanda. I could have written more about working with American university students, but they are still developing an understanding for what it means to be an American in an African context. Maybe I’ll write about that experience at a later time. I’ll let this post remain dedicated to Rwanda. BUT here are some random pictures of my time heading in and out of Rwanda.