Chef du jour

This morning I scurried to complete the last few books that needed the charts; wanted to make sure Akilah could take them to school with her. Think I ended up doing about one hundred and four. There’s no way in the world I would’ve done it this way when I was substituting in the Baltimore City School System.

Its amazing that as bad as things may appear to westerners who come here, there is one distinct advantage these students have over those in the states. By the time they’ve reached age eighteen or so, they’ve been exposed to, at minimum, three languages. In her school some of the students taking english are also taking german or spanish. Then there’s the native tongue of their city; which means they’re speaking bamoun, pidgen english or any other number of dialects. I think she’s mentioned that Cameroon has at least two hundred and fifty different ethnic groups.

Today’s assignment? Typing a play one of the students wrote. At first sight, I thought I’d be typing a while. However, once getting started, it was obvious that it was very easy typing. In total it was about four typed pages of a two act play; later in the afternoon though, she would bring home about one or two more acts.

The story is quite interesting, too. Apparently, secret societies are big here (as if they aren’t in the states), and the story alludes to the mythical inner workings of one such society.

The premise is that the leader of the society is upset because someone is going about telling the people of the deeds; spreading rumors, more or less. He is not particular happy, because in fact the rumors are true. So he asks the “Judas” to stand up and be identified. Someone else actually ends up identifying the culprit.

However, he did not do it out of spite, it was actually an attempt to recruit someone into the organization. What he didn’t realize was that the individual would go about and tell others what he had mentioned to him; the children disappearing where a result of the society’s chief killing them.

So as the story plays out, within this society, they also share money with one another; whoever needs it that month gives their reasoning and when accepted provides the list of victims (children) who can be offered to the ancestors. This one guy just wants money so he can live comfortably, contrasted with another who wants money so he get back on his feet after his plantations were destroyed, and car needing repair.

Well, the first gentleman tries to be slick and asks his daughter to prepare a list of family members so he can begin purchasing christmas gifts for them. Then he slyly asks her to do one of her friends as well, and he’ll purchase gifts for them. When he returns to the meeting to submit his names, the chief makes certain that he has given him the correct list. In the end the gentleman doesn’t realize that he’s given the name of himself and his family to the chief; and they now must die.

The morale of the story? Everything comes in due time, if you rush to get it before your time, you’ll never truly get to enjoy it. There’s definitely a strong message here, I actually kind of impressed about the whole thing. There are a few other plays she’ll be bringing home for me to document. It would be nice to see someone’s idea be used for something at home, and then have them compensated. That would do them and their families well.

While cleaning various files off my laptop, I stumbled across a recipe for veggie burgers. Ironically, the two main ingredients were black beans and rice. “Wooh!” We just happened to have some leftover beans and rice in the refrigerator, and seeing as how we were trying to figure out what to do with them, this seemed perfect. Initially Akilah thought of doing some vegetable tempura mix, but I thought she might like this idea better; she did.

We went through the recipe (I’ll include it after this entry) and made the mix, and as it slowly came together, we were both like, “Wow, this is really simple to do.” It was extremely simple and doesn’t require much effort. When you figure that the two main ingredients are the leftovers of another meal, the hardest part is out of the way.

I was given the duty of preparing the burgers from beginning to end, and Akilah was now reinspired to make banana bread. By the time we finished eating those burgers, we were definitely content. I had two and a half, Akilah had one and a half.  These weren’t normal sized burgers, they were the “around-the-way-grilled-barbecue-burgers” your mamma used to make; that’s if you lived in my type neighborhoods when you grew up.

The banana bread was good, as well. Although she thought it had a funny taste to it, I couldn’t tell, and gobbled up a piece of it. We’ll take a little of both with us this weekend; we’re going to visit Becky. I’m really excited, because I get to stop by the cyber cafe and spend some time on the internet. I’ve been fiending all week. Even considered taking my laptop to the cabine and making an international call just to connect and download email. If the price weren’t so high, I’m sure I would’ve.

Bafoussam here I come.