Paper Sharks and Fufu

The entire time I was in Sierra Leone I searched for a certain meal I came to depend on while I was in the Peace Corps in Cameroun.  It is called fufu and is a staple dish of many African and Carribean countries.  It can be made from a variety of vegetables but I am partial to the cassava fufu.  It is a pretty labor intensive process.  First you harvest the cassava (aka yuca), a long waxy brown tuber that grows easily in tropical climates.  You then soak the tuber in water for a few days.  It is then pealed and cut up into small squares and laid out on sheets of tin roof to dry in the hot sun.  It gives off a tangy, musty odor as it dries.  Once it is fully dried, it is taken and placed into a giant mortar and pounded with a thick wooden pestle until a thin flour is made.  The flour is then added to a pot of boiling water and stirred with a long wooden spoon or stick until it becomes the consistency of a sticky cream of wheat.  It is balled and served alongside a ground nut sauce with any number of bitter leaves.  You pull off a piece of the ball with your hands and soak up the sauce with it.  Generally, it is a communal meal with everyone eating from a giant ball of fufu and dipping it into one bowl of sauce.  It is more than an acquired taste.  It is an acquired religion.

Cassava fufu is food for the people and prepared in any village in Sierra Leone.  I asked for it from every kitchen.  People smiled, perhaps thinking I was kidding.  Why would this tall, lanky white man want to eat villager fufu?  I saw the pestles in the village on the way to work rise and fall, pounding the dried root vegetable into flour the same way their ancestors have done for centuries.  As my time came to a close in Sierra Leone, I came to terms with the fact that I wouldn't be reunited with fufu this time around.

Dr. Kafoe, one of the Sierra Leonean physicians I befriended, invited me over to the One Mile Lodge where he and several other colleagues were staying on my last day in Sierra Leone.  We had talked about getting together for weeks but with schedules and families had yet to make this happen. Until the day I was leaving.  One Mile Lodge sat at the end of a dirt road that passed through a palm grove. It was encircled by a concrete wall atop which jutted shards of broken glass bottles.  They looked like hot, angry green teeth in the wash of the mid-day sun.  The Lodge is a group of small concrete two story buildings painted in pastel colors that open up into a communal concrete courtyard with a small bar on one end and a deck on the other with small plastic tables adorned with vases holding old, faded fake flowers.  It is much more intimate and African than the Bai Suba where most of us stayed.

I greeted Alusine, our pharmacist, who was wearing a tie in the colors of the Sierra Leonean flag and pressed clothes that conformed to his body perfectly with no excess.  His wife, Michelle, wore a traditional African dress in a semi-glossed print of brown and black, her head covered in matching material.  A Guinean physician, Dr. Bah, soon arrived, belly out front with a huge smile that closed his eyes when it fully expanded to take over his whole face.  There were a number of Kenyan nurses, including Anne, who sat quietly with her legs crossed, eating an orange.  Kamara and Kafoe, my two Sierra Leonean colleagues, darted around in Sunday attire grabbing extra chairs and glasses like any hosts would do anywhere.  Mohammed, another physician from Sudan, and I sat and washed our hands in the bowl of water put on the table as is customary in Africa.  We spoke of his time working in Darfur and of providing medical care when the refugee camp you are working in is getting shelled.  "That is when I started smoking," he said.  There we all were, brought together by Ebola, teammates for the past month and a half, at my final meal in Sierra Leone.  Michelle, it was announced, had prepared the meal for the occasion, a meal typical for most families on Sunday.  She brought out the plates covered by plates.  I took off the top and low and behold.... cassava fufu!!!  Apparently, Kafoe had mentioned that I was enamored by the root vegetable dish and they all had prepared the dish earlier that day.  Kafoe giggled as he showed me the video of the men turning the fufu out behind the concrete wall over a small fire.  I was not only heading home, I was home.  We ate there as a group that had experienced something we may never experience again, pulling off the fufu with our fingers and using it as our utensil to collect the sauce.  The hot African pepper peaked late, was washed down by cold orange Fanta.  We sat and talked and laughed for hours, never once mentioning Ebola.  It was, for once, not the largest occupant of our shared space, having been temporarily minimized by the power of connection.

After thirty six hours in transit, in and out of dreamless airplane sleep, I landed back in San Francisco to find my wife waiting for me, alone, with sunflowers in her hand.  I have been home for three days now and am serving my twenty one days in isolation in our converted garage guesthouse, "la casita."  I call the health department twice a day with my temperatures and meet with them weekly.  Ebola can incubate in human hosts for up to twenty one days but generally will infect people within ten days of their last exposure to the virus.  I am not concerned.  I have the requisite GI issues and a low level nausea that accompanies foreign travel.  And the re-entry phenomenon.  I hide behind the jet lag.  Now I am cutting out sharks from glitter paper with my children to make valentine's day cards for their classes. They tell me I look old.

I run in the cold mountains behind my house when the kids are in school and my wife is at work.  I crawl back into writing, the space between words.  It has always been more about what isn't said.  I cut out more sharks and glue them to clothes pins.  My son glues the googly eye on and opens the mouth up by squeezing the clothes pin.  "Chomp!" he says in a growl.  My daughter recites a line from the play she is taking part in at school called "Into the Woods."  I watch their mouths and bodies move here in our toy room.  My wife keeps them on track so we can finish the valentine's day cards by Friday.  Outside the recent winter rains have summoned a green carpet to the hill's empty field behind our house.  The Christmas lights are still strung up in the trees.  I want to take them down.  Maybe tomorrow.

The number of new cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone has risen for the second week in a row now.

Fufu

Mohammed

Kafoe

Bah

Sunday Fufu Supper Club