Africa: Food and Health

Hello!

This week it's a double blog -- I'm writing about food in Africa and illnesses in Africa, if the title hadn't given it away. I'm doing this because I have lots of pictures of food, but not many memories, and lots of memories of injuries but not many pictures.

Starting with food -- the staple food of the region was a sticky substance called kam, made from manioc and eaten with a sauce and meat.  You'd dip the kam into the sauce, similar to dipping naans into curry sauce. It was quite a tasty dish!

The production of kam

We also ate insects such as caterpillars and termites, and snails.

Snails 'n rice. Yum.

Caterpillars

We also ate things like duikers, pangolins, gazelles, and on the non-meat side, bread.  Bread was in two forms -- bread rolls and baguettes. The bread rolls were simple enough to make, the baguettes were not. They had to be baked in a big bread oven; luckily we had one in our back garden. I remember when the bread had finished baking, we'd dip bits in a mixture of olive oil and garlic. We also dipped pieces of bread (both kinds) in hot chocolate.

My mum with a dead gazelle

Making the baguettes

The bread oven

Me eating the bread!

I remember my favourite food was pasta carbonara.  It still is, actually. I also quite liked egg fried rice (Karys' favourite meal), and beans and rice. When I was younger, I didn't like it so much, because I felt like we had it once a week. Looking back, I've realised I do like it, because it's a familiar dish. It's reminiscent of childhood. Naturally, we also occasionally ate the hapless chickens, though I assume it was male chickens and the sickly/elderly we ate.

We also once ate a snake. We ran over it in the car and decided to eat it later. I cannot remember a thing about eating it; bizarrely, I can remember thinking something along the lines of "It's a pity I'm not going to remember this in years to come." I assume given the scales and the anatomical layout (long, legless body with spine down the middle) it might have had a similar texture to fish.

Moving onto health -- the first thing I'm going to mention is my Harry Potter scar! I sustained it over two separate incidents; the first occasion was falling off the bed onto a concrete floor, necessitating stitches. When I split my head open the second time, the resulting cut was close to the first, but in the opposite direction, effectively creating a drunken lightning bolt, or the number '5' without the top part. I can't speak to snakes, but my scar used to sting sometimes, when sweat trickled along it. Weirdly, one of my friends also has a lightning bolt scar, except his is more like Harry's.

I have several other scars; there's one on the side of my head, resulting from the removal of a growth. I developed said growth when I was about 9. Mostly it sat there, but when I had a coughing fit on an aeroplane it started bleeding. The growth was removed during an operation on my palate back in England, leaving a scar. The growth, as it turns out, was benign. Oddly, I've had that scar for around a decade now, and only once has anyone noticed, though in fairness it's difficult to spot.

The third scar I've got is a scar on the sole of my foot; when I was around 8, I stepped on a sardine tin and got a nasty cut. It left a scar, naturally -- though for years I thought it hadn't. I only recently discovered I still have the scar.

I've also had surgery on my palate; part of CHARGE syndrome is the cleft palate, where the hard palate at the top of the mouth isn't formed properly. When I was around 6 months old, I swallowed my tongue and nearly died; after that, the palate was sewn up. However, by the time I was 9, it apparently needed to be fixed again -- I think the issue was that my mouth had outgrown the original surgery. As a result, we went to England, and I had an operation to correct the problem -- during the surgery they removed the growth as well. I had to stay at home after the operation, otherwise I risked getting a mouth infection. I also had to eat specially made pureed food. I remember the porridge I ate -- Redi-Brek -- tasted nice. Scrambled eggs, however, did not.

One of my friends was actually in the hospital at the same time as me -- she had appendicitis.

I once sprained my ankle very badly; I fell down some steps. It was in the Annexe, in Yaounde. I needed crutches to get around for several weeks after that, though I generally crawled instead; I didn't feel confident I wouldn't fall over again. Ever since then, my right ankle has been weaker than my left -- if I stumble, I can feel it bending further than it should be able to, and I've sprained that ankle several more times, though less severely. I'm quite sure that one of these days, it's finally going to give out completely, and I'll have a broken ankle.

In terms of illness -- I've had several chest infections as a child. I've also had the usual coughs, colds and flus of childhood. I once had chicken pox; Karys got chicken pox, then my parents allowed me to keep playing with her, so I'd catch it as well. There's a good reason for that -- children recover easier from chicken pox than adults do, and once you get it you're immune forever. 

I've also had malaria, twice, once when I was 4 years old and once when I was 6-7 years old. I don't remember much about those periods, but I do remember that I slept in the same room as my parents, because they wanted to keep an eye on me during the night. They'd heard a story about a boy who had malaria -- his parents had decided to take him to hospital in the morning, but he died in the night. I don't think I went to hospital; on both occasions we were in rural areas far away from a big city (Misaje, Cameroon and Bilolo). As a result, there wasn't much my mum and dad could do apart from feed me anti-malaria tablets and oral rehydration fluid. Oral rehydration fluid (or ORF) is a mixture of water, salt and sugar. Like I've said, I don't remember much, but I do remember, quite clearly, a memory of drinking Foster Clarks (out of a Coca-Cola bottle!) Foster Clarks is powder, like cup-a-soup; there's specific fruit juice flavours, such as guava juice, berry juice and mango juice. You pour the powder into a jug (or a bottle, with the aid of a funnel), add water and mix the two together, and you have instant juice. I remember drinking the Foster Clarks, when I was ill with malaria, and what I remember vividly is that I felt better than I had done in ages. For a long time, I assumed that, through the power of the placebo effect, the Foster Clarks had helped me get better; now, I'm pretty sure that that moment represented a point where I was finally getting better, independent of the effects of fruit juice.

Something else I remember relating to malaria is that Karys, when she was younger, was fond of claiming that there was one time in our lives where she was taller than me -- one of the occasions where I was ill with malaria. I've seen photos from that time -- while I am very skinny in them, I've always had doubts that my skinniness made me shorter. Though who knows -- maybe Karys was taller (temporarily), because she was still able to eat regular quantities of food, so she grew more than I did!

The first time I had malaria,  aged four.