Sunday, June 18, 2017
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
BRUNEI
READ
One of the
biggest challenges in attempting to read a book from every country is finding
books that have been translated into English. When I made my preliminary list
of books for this blog, I was able to find only a couple of novels available in English written by
authors from Brunei, and neither book actually seemed to relate to that country.
Finally, I learned about Written in Black, by K. H. Lim, which is set in Brunei and centers around a
Bruneian-Chinese family.
The book’s
protagonist is ten-year-old Jonathan, who is reading Huckleberry Finn when he receives a phone call from his uncle
telling him that his grandfather has died. That begins a series of
life-changing events for young Jonathan, as his family’s problems cause him to
do things he would never have attempted otherwise. We learn that his mother left
the family six months ago, ostensibly for health reasons, and Jonathan is
desperate to talk to her. Somehow, she always manages to call when he’s not
home. His older brother also left home, seemingly the action of a rebellious
teenager. Jonathan’s father, then, is left to raise Jonathan, his older sister,
and younger brother.
They leave
their home for a few days to stay with Jonathan’s uncle in order to perform the
customary funeral rites for Jonathan’s grandfather. While talking with his
cousin, Jonathan learns that his older brother Michael has been in frequent
contact with their mother, which leads to Jonathan’s decision to sneak away and
find Michael. What follows is misadventure upon misadventure, or as Jonathan
later describes it, “…so far, I’d survived a ride in a coffin, a cursed house,
a horde of bats, a pack of wild dogs, and a gang of lunatics.”
While
Jonathan is no Huck Finn, and the author of Written in Black is no Mark Twain, this was a fun story about a boy who decided to
take matters into his own hands. The plot’s twists and turns kept me interested
all the way to the end of the book.
COOK
No particular Bruneian dish caught my eye when reading Written in Black. However, there were several descriptions of the lush fruit trees and extensive vegetable garden at Jonathan’s uncle’s house. In particular, there are two leafy mango trees that provide shade for the cage of Pak Tut, a nearly five-foot-long monitor lizard. When I googled Bruneian recipes, I found one for mangoes with sticky rice, which I decided to make in honor of Pak Tut.
The recipe I
used was on a website called Asian Recipe, and was very easy to make, something
I really appreciated after some of the more difficult recipes I’ve attempted
for previous blog posts. I wasn’t able to find coconut cream at any
of my grocery stores, so just used coconut milk instead. The rice didn’t turn
out to be very sticky, but this was still a delicious and refreshing dessert.
GIVE
I spent a
long time searching online for an organization in Brunei with a mechanism for
online donations, but I didn’t have any luck. In particular, I had hoped to
donate to the Brunei Darussalam AIDS Council, “a non-profit, community-based organisation
tackling the HIV & AIDS situation in Brunei Darussalam,” but couldn’t figure
out an easy way to get money to them. So at this point, I have not made a
donation to an organization in Brunei, but if I find a way to do that in the
future, I’ll update this page with that information.
NEXT STOP: BULGARIA
Sunday, May 28, 2017
BRAZIL
READ
It’s been
much too long since my last blog post. I have an explanation, though. I really
didn’t like the book I had chosen for Brazil, and it didn’t help that it was
521 pages long. I tried to keep plugging away, but when I was about halfway
through, I finally threw in the towel and decided to choose another book.
I’m so glad
I did! Otherwise, I would not have discovered Adriana Lisboa and her wonderful
book, Crow Blue. The book’s main character, Vanja (short for
Evangelina), is a thirteen-year-old girl who leaves her home in Rio de Janeiro
when her mother dies, and moves to Lakewood, Colorado, to live with her mother’s
ex-husband, Fernando. He and her mother divorced long before Vanja was born,
but Fernando agrees to let Vanja live with him and help her find her father.
Fernando was
originally from Brazil too, where he was a Communist guerrilla fighting against
the military dictatorship. While most of Crow Blue focuses on Vanja’s new life in the United States, there are flashbacks
to the guerrilla days that Fernando left behind.
In Colorado,
Vanja befriends a nine-year-old neighbor boy, Carlos, whose family is from El
Salvador. She helps him with his homework, and gives him a safe and happy place
to spend his spare time. Carlos has lived in Colorado for as long as he can
remember, but the concern that he and his family will be sent back to El
Salvador because they “didn’t have papeles” is never far from his mind. Vanja and Fernando take Carlos with them on a week-long road trip to New Mexico, which deepens the bond among the three of them.
Crow Blue is more than just a
coming-of-age book. It’s a heartwarming story of how three exiles from other
lives and other places can become a family of their own.
COOK
Since most
of Crow Blue is set in the United
States, Brazilian food doesn’t really factor into the plot. So the dish I chose
to make for this post is one that was mentioned in the book I tried to read
first. The dish is called feijoada, and it’s a Brazilian stew that’s usually
made with meat. Fortunately, I found a Jamie Oliver recipe for a vegetarian
version and decided to make that. I didn’t have to do much to veganize the
recipe – I just substituted a dollop of vegan sour cream for the yogurt on top
of the stew. The bigger challenge was trying to translate a British recipe into
terminology and measurements that can be understood in a U.S. kitchen. For the
record, a courgette is a zucchini, and I converted the ingredients that were
listed in grams as follows:
·
Rice – since the stew is served over the rice,
there was no need for a precise conversion. I just cooked a cup of brown rice
according to the package instructions.
·
Sweet potato – 200 grams is a little less than
half a pound.
·
Kidney beans – actually, I substituted black
beans, which are more likely to appear in a Brazilian dish, and I used the
whole 15-ounce can.
·
Fresh coriander (cilantro) – I used about a
fourth of a cup, finely chopped
·
Vegan yogurt or sour cream – it’s just a dollop on
top of a bowl of stew, so no measurement conversion was necessary.
It turned
out quite well, although it’s a dish better suited to the fall or winter,
rather than these warm late spring days that we’re having in Sacramento!
GIVE
In Crow Blue, Fernando and other resistance
fighters live and train in the state of Pará, a vast, forested area near
the Amazon River. It’s described as being “…almost big enough for two Frances.
Three Japans. Two Spains and a bit. More than one thousand, six hundred
Singapores.” Since the time when Fernando was there, however, forests have been cleared in obscene numbers.
“Amazon forests continue being cleared to the order of one Belgium a year,
basically for cattle farming. The miracle of the transubstantiation of forest
into beef. (Soy? It too is transubstantiated. It is exported and becomes cattle
fodder in rich countries.)”
When I
looked for projects in Brazil on the GlobalGiving website, I was happy to find
Forests4Water Brazil, which is a community reforestation project administered by
an organization called Iracambi. According to the project summary, this
organization has already planted 100,000 native rainforest trees, and they have
plans to plant another 10,000 this year. It may not be possible to undo the
damage that’s already been done to the Amazonian rainforest, but I wanted my
donation for Brazil to be used to help correct the mistakes of the past.
More
information about the Forests4Water Brazil reforestation project is available
at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/forests-4-water/.
NEXT
STOP: BRUNEI
Friday, April 28, 2017
BOTSWANA
READ
First off,
let me just say that I loved the protagonist in Unity Dow’s book, The Heavens May Fall. She’s a young,
smart, fierce lawyer working for a nonprofit organization that helps women and
children in Mochudi, Botswana. It’s hard for me to not love a character whose
inner musings on the first page of the book go like this:
“Why can’t I
watch the news of rapes by military men in the DRC, babies with distended
bellies and flies eating at their eyes in the Sudan, and go back to my coffee?
Why does an old woman waiting in a queue for service by a rude and incompetent
clerk make me feel personally responsible? Why must I enter the fray, always,
even if it just means dashing off a letter of complaint? Is there a busybody
gene, and if so, why do I have to
have it?”
If you are
one of those people with a busybody gene, someone who feels the need to try to
right every wrong, you’ll love Naledi Chaba too. As the attorney for the
Bana-Bantle Children’s Agency, she handles cases for battered women, young rape
victims, and those facing other heartbreaking situations. She fights against a
system that lets a rapist go free because his young victim is mute and
therefore unable to testify against him. She displays tact and sensitivity in
dealing with a client who blames her marital problems on witchcraft. And she is
relentless on behalf of a young girl who was raped by her grandparents’ tenant,
even though her fight for justice puts her on a collision course with the judge
hearing the case.
In between
cases, the author shows the reader other sides of Naledi. She and her cousin
and best friend Mmidi, a doctor, fret about standards of beauty and fashion, as
well as society’s expectation that women will marry and have children. Naledi
tries to balance the time spent on her professional responsibilities with her
desire to build a relationship with the new man in her life, a rugby player on
the Botswana national team. She laments the indignity of having to beg for funding all the time when working for a
nonprofit organization. And she
makes time every week to go see her widowed father, whom she adores.
The Heavens May Fall
seems very authentic, possibly because the author herself began her career as a
lawyer who championed women’s rights. She went on to become Botswana’s first
female High Court judge, and she currently serves her country as the Minister
of Education and Skill Development. I’m glad she found time to write this wonderful
book in the midst of all her other work!
COOK
Early in the
book, Naledi’s cousin Mmidi is talking with envy about a widow named Lesika,
who seems to have everything. She has a pretty face and a full figure, speaks multiple
languages, and never lets things get her down. Naledi knows Lesika. “She sold
homemade bread door-to-door in the evenings and at weekends and was rather good
at persuading me to buy yet another batch of diphaphatha, even before I had run out of the last.”
I looked up
diphaphatha and found that it’s similar to a biscuit, although somewhat flatter
and harder. I found a recipe on a blog called “Sapodilla Brown,” and gave it a
try. I thought the bread was pretty tasty, especially with a little margarine
and jam. Apparently, diphaphatha is usually cooked on a cast iron skillet over
an open flame, so I was happy to find a recipe that used an oven instead. Also,
some recipes use yeast as the leavening agent instead of baking powder, which
would probably make for a lighter roll.
GIVE
I looked online without success for the equivalent of Naledi’s Bana-Bantle Children’s Agency. I would have loved to donate to such an organization. Since I couldn’t find anything like that, I went back to GlobalGiving and found a project in Botswana that offers science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education to vulnerable girls, ages 12 to 25. According to Stepping Stones International, many vulnerable young girls “become caregivers which increases the likelihood that they obtain inadequate health care, are not protected from sexual exploitation and lose focus on education."
The “Girls
Getting Geeky” program provides after-school education that helps girls develop
design process skill, which they apply to different engineering challenges. It
is hoped that this program will lead to an increase in the number of girls who
complete secondary school and then either go on to college or find employment.
More
information about the “Girls Getting Geeky” program is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/stem-education-in-botswana-girls-getting-geeky/.
NEXT STOP:
BRAZIL
Monday, April 24, 2017
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
READ
One of the
main reasons I embarked on this global reading project was to fill in the many holes
in my knowledge about the people, culture, and history of other countries. I
feel as though I am gaining a much greater understanding of the world in which
I live, although reading only one book from a country doesn’t give me nearly
the depth and breadth of knowledge that I would like to attain.
Reading The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andrić,
for my book on Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, provided me with a very broad
perspective on this area, as the book covers a time period of approximately four
hundred years. The focal point of the book is a bridge that was built to span
the river Drina in the town of Višegrad. It is referred to only as “the
bridge” in the book, but it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has been
named the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge, after the Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire who ordered
its construction.
The author, a
former Yugoslav diplomat, uses the bridge, not as a character, necessarily, but
as the unifying element that connects all the other characters and events
chronicled in the book. Some chapters educate the reader about the history of
the area, and others tell the stories of individuals or families. In all cases,
however, the bridge plays a central role.
The Grand Vezir
for whom the bridge was named grew up near the Drina, but was taken away by
soldiers of the Ottoman Empire when he was ten years old. This was due to the
practice of blood tribute, in which boys between the ages of ten and fifteen
were forcibly removed from their families and taken to the Sultan in Istanbul,
which was then known as Stambul. This boy grew up to become a very important
person in the Sultan’s court, and he used his power and position to build the
bridge in the area from which he had been taken.
Although The Bridge on the Drina is centered in
the town of Višegrad, it soon becomes clear that what happens in Višegrad is symptomatic of what is going on
in a much greater part of the world around it. As the residents of the town
discover, “Who could ever have dreamt that the affairs of the world were in
such dependence upon one another and were linked together across so great a
distance?” While the town is controlled by the Ottoman Empire for most of the
years covered by this book, the reader sees the beginning of the fall of the
Ottoman Empire reflected in the handing over of Bosnia to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. And when a Serb in Sarajevo assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the
political repercussions are felt in Višegrad by not only the Serbian residents, but by
all who live there.
Aside from the
historical and political importance of the bridge, it serves as a meeting place
for the people of Višegrad. As the author points out, “In all tales about personal, family or
public events the words ‘on the bridge’ could always be heard. Indeed on the
bridge over the Drina were the first steps of childhood and the first games of
boyhood.” The book tells the story of an unhappy bride in a wedding party
crossing the bridge to take her to the home of the man she’s been forced to
marry. It showcases students arguing about politics and philosophy as they sit
together on the bridge, men who have had too much to drink performing dangerous
feats above the raging waters of the Drina, and old men of differing faiths smoking
on the bridge as they discuss how best to navigate the changes facing the
village.
Ivo Andrić was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1961, and in the award ceremony speech, The Bridge on the Drina was referred to as his masterpiece. The
speech goes on to explain that the Nobel Prize was bestowed on Andrić "for the epic force with which you have traced themes
and depicted human destinies from your country's history."
Clearly, if I had to pick only
one book from Bosnia and Herzegovina for this project, I could not have chosen
a better one than The Bridge on the Drina.
COOK
Judging from the number of
cooking failures I’ve had in trying to prepare vegan dishes for this blog, I’d
have to say that the “Cook” portion of this blog is the weak link. I’m going to
keep plugging away and hope it gets better, but I’m afraid that this week’s
dish didn’t turn out very well.
I didn’t find anything that I
wanted to make mentioned in the book. The author included several references to
halva, but since I’d made a version of that particular dish for my blog post on
Bahrain, I didn’t want to make it again so soon. So I looked online and found a
blog called the Old Curiosity Shop that had a recipe for a potato dish, kljukuša, that seemed easy enough to
make. The only thing that needed to be changed to make the dish vegan was to
substitute some other liquid for the milk and/or cream the recipe called for. I
used almond milk, and just did not like the taste of the finished product. My
mom suggested that if I make it again, I might want to just use vegetable broth
in place of the milk, so I may give that a try someday.
GIVE
War was a constant in Bosnia and
Herzegovina during the years covered in The Bridge on the Drina, and it has continued to plague the area in the years
thereafter. On the GlobalGiving website, three of the seven charitable projects
listed for Bosnia and Herzegovina were related to the subject of peace. I chose
to give my donation to the Center for Peacebuilding in order to help sponsor
youth to attend their Peace Camp. At the camp, participants will address their
past traumas and learn to become involved in facilitating peacebuilding activities
in their home communities. According to the Center for Peacebuilding, research
has shown that young people who have participated in the Peace Camp have become
more involved in volunteering and developed more close relationships with
members of other ethnic groups. More information about the Center for
Peacebuilding’s Peace Camp is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/youth-peacebuilding-bih/.
NEXT STOP: BOTSWANA
Saturday, April 15, 2017
BOLIVIA
READ
While
reading Juan de Recacoechea’s American Visa, I was surprised by how familiar the author’s writing style felt. It
didn’t seem as though I were reading a book from Latin America – it felt like I
was reading something written by a U.S. writer. I finally realized that, even though the characters
were Bolivian and the setting was in La Paz, the book was written in a
style the protagonist and narrator, Mario Alvarez, greatly admires – that of a
noir novel. When visiting a bookstore, he observes: “I always liked noir novels
about detectives and hoods that have clear beginnings and endings. Guys like
Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes can change my life for a few hours, freeing
me to see the world through the eyes of Philip Marlowe or Grave Digger Jones.”
Mario is a
small-town Bolivian school teacher who goes to the capital city of La Paz to try to
obtain an American tourist visa from the U.S. consulate. His son, who lives in
Florida, has sent him a plane ticket, but Mario needs a visa in order to travel
to the United States. Obtaining a visa is no small task, requiring Mario to prove that he
has considerable financial assets. Otherwise, the fear is that he won’t return
to Bolivia but will remain in the U.S. without permission.
When Mario
goes to the U.S. consulate, he has numerous documents with him as evidence of
his financial security. Unfortunately, they’re all forged. He doesn’t think
this will be a problem, but while he’s waiting for his number to be called, he
hears the people around him talking about how they are going to have to wait
for three days while the consulate verifies their documents. In fact, one woman
tells him the consulate hires detectives to do background checks on visa
applicants. Disturbed by this news, Mario leaves the consulate and goes back to
the cheap hotel where he’s staying.
The hotel
houses a variety of colorful characters that one might expect to find in a noir
novel: an unsavory desk clerk, a down-on-his-luck former diplomat, a
resplendent transvestite named Gardenia, and, of course, a hooker with a heart
of gold. The former diplomat tells Mario about a travel agency that, for a
hefty fee, will handle the whole visa process for him. The rest of the book
follows Mario’s adventures and misadventures as he tries to come up with the
money for the fee.
The book’s
afterword by Ilan Stavans explains how de Recacoechea came to write a book in
this style. Stavans calls American Visa “a
by-product of the ‘90s, a period of intense reaction to magical realism and its
forgotten generals, clairvoyant prostitutes, and epidemics of insomnia,” as
found in the works of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, for example. According
to Stavans, “Juan de Recacoechea, along with an entire generation, became
allergic to these stories, finding them too remote, too ethereal. Instead, he
prefers the dirty urban landscape of La Paz, where the only thing magical is
one’s talent to make ends meet.”
I have to
admit that I found the gritty quality of de Recacoechea’s work to be much more
accessible than the otherworldliness of the magical realists. But then, I’ve
always been a sucker for a good noir novel.
COOK
Most of the
things Mario and his friends ate in American Visa didn’t seem like they would be very easy to veganize. Even searching
the Internet for a good vegan Bolivian recipe was a little daunting, with one
website saying “[t]he Bolivian cuisine almost lacks for the vegetarian recipes.”
Fortunately, that same website, Recipes Wikia, provided a recipe for huminta
that didn’t require any changes or substitutions. Huminta (or humita, in some Latin
American countries) is a casserole that’s usually prepared with corn, but the
recipe I used called for quinoa. Other key ingredients included tofu, winter
squash, tahini, and anise extract, but the overwhelming flavors in this recipe
were quinoa and anise. I found it to be a little dense, and thought it could
have benefited from less quinoa and more butternut squash. I’m going to follow
the recipe’s suggestion to slice and pan-fry the leftovers. Everything is
better fried, right?
GIVE
GlobalGiving
offers several options for donating to non-profit projects in Bolivia. The one
I chose should be near and dear to the hearts of all vegans – addressing the
problems created by the practice of monoculture farming that relies heavily on
the use of pesticides. Sustainable Bolivia has created the Permaculture
Practitioner Young Leaders Program to provide “practical
training for 400 middle school students from agricultural areas.” According to
Sustainable Bolivia, the “Permaculture techniques we teach will be aimed at
improving soil fertility, harvesting water, and building living interactions
that save time and increase productivity.” The hope is that the students who
participate in this program will go home and share these permaculture
techniques with their communities. More information about the Permaculture
Practitioner Young Leaders Program is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/permaculture-sustainable-bolivia-mizque/.
NEXT STOP: BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Sunday, April 9, 2017
BHUTAN
READ
The concept
of karma is probably familiar to most readers. If you’re like me, you think of
it as some kind of cosmic payback when a person does something bad, or a reward
when they do something good. Other than that cursory understanding, I have to
confess that I haven’t given much thought to how karma is actually supposed to
work.
In reading The Circle of Karma, by Kunzang Choden,
for my book about Bhutan, I was interested to see that karma is used to explain
everything that happens in a person’s life, good or bad. The book’s
protagonist, Tsomo, is the daughter of an important religious man in their
village, who explains that “everybody was the way they were because of the way
they had lived their previous lives.” Religious practice allows a person to
accumulate merit to ensure that his or her next life will be better than the
current one.
This causes
a certain amount of consternation for Tsomo since, as a girl, she’s not taught
to read or write, two things that she wants to learn more than anything, and
she worries that her lack of education will preclude her from accumulating
enough merit to make her next life better. But she’s a dutiful daughter and
stays home learning how to cook, work in the fields, weave, and care for her
family.
Astrology is
also an important factor in Tsomo’s village. Her mother is told by the
astrologer that Tsomo “will be restless, always wanting to travel." Her mother
doesn’t really believe that part of the horoscope is true because, “where can a
girl, even a restless one, travel to?”.
Actually, a
girl can travel to many places, as Tsomo discovers when circumstances cause her
to leave her village, and she comes to the realization that “[s]he had to learn
to be on her own.” Her travels over the next few decades take her to India and
Nepal, where she learns to be self-reliant, meets new friends, and finds many
ways to accumulate merit.
I had more
trouble than I expected with the use of karma to explain every situation in
this book. For example, I felt like the man who took advantage of Tsomo and
treated her with indifference for many years before finally abandoning her got
off much too lightly by having his behavior characterized thus: “He had come
to collect the dues she owed him from some lifetimes past and he left her
fifteen years later, completely depleted both emotionally and financially.” Invoking
karma as an excuse for bad behavior was a bridge too far for me.
I admired
Tsomo’s resilience, persistence, and resourcefulness, and I followed her
travels with interest. The book's author, Kunzang Choden, is the first Bhutanese woman to write a novel in English, and I felt like she did a wonderful job of bringing Tsomo's character to life.
COOK
Throughout
The Circle of Karma, Tsomo eats momos, a steamed dumpling common to the Himalayan
countries of India, Nepal, and Bhutan. The ones she eats are filled with meat,
such as pork or yak, but I found a recipe for vegan momos on the Aapdu Kitchen website. I followed the recipe fairly closely, except that I couldn’t find
ginger garlic paste at my grocery store. Instead, I added a tablespoon of
finely chopped ginger to the recipe, and substituted chili garlic sauce for the
red chilli sauce in order to include the garlic flavor. The recipe calls for a
capsicum, and I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up. Turns out it’s
just the scientific name for the pepper family. Since there were numerous
references in the book to the Bhutanese people’s love of chillis, I used a
spicy serrano pepper.
I wish I
could say the momos turned out well, but I really can’t. I didn’t roll the
dough thinly enough, and I felt like the chili garlic sauce overwhelmed the
taste of the other ingredients. Serving the momos with mango chutney helped,
but this recipe definitely won’t go down in the books as one of my best.
GIVE
I checked
the GlobalGiving website to see if they had any projects in Bhutan. They had
one, helping the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy to create greater
awareness among the citizens of Bhutan about how a participatory democracy
works. The country transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional
monarchy in 2008, holding the first election for the National Assembly of
Bhutan. Since democracy is a new concept there, people are not necessarily
familiar with their rights and responsibilities under this new system of
government.
The Bhutan
Centre for Media and Democracy is taking a three-pronged approach to educating
the people of Bhutan: “First, it ‘inspires active citizens’ through
projects that tackle social problems. Second, it ‘encourages and expands public
discourse’ by organizing forums focused on diverse topics such as the role of
media and the crisis of democracy in modern times. Third, it produces ‘resources
for democracy’ targeted towards all citizens, ranging from rural teachers to
government officials.”
More
information about the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/empower-bhutans-citizens-to-engage-in-democracy/.
NEXT STOP: BOLIVIA
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