CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

READ

As was the case with the book I chose last week for Cape Verde, there are very few books from the Central African Republic that have been translated into English. The book that I and other bloggers who are reading the world have found for this country is Daba’s Travels from Ouadda to Bangui, by Pierre Makombo Bamboté.

This book is geared more to children than adults, maybe in the eight to twelve-year-old range, and tells the story of Daba’s idyllic life growing up in the Central African Republic. According to the book’s dedication, it’s based on the author’s own childhood. It begins in the village of Ouadda, where Daba lives a happy life with his parents. His father supports the family by gathering rubber, honey, and beeswax, and by growing cotton.

The action soon moves to the town of Bambari, about 125 miles away, where Daba is sent to attend boarding school. He does well in school, spends time in other villages during school breaks, and acquires a pen-pal from Marseilles named Guy. When Guy wins a trip to Africa in a contest, he, Daba, and a few other of Daba’s fellow students spend a summer teaching people in a nearby village how to read and write. As the summer ends and Guy returns to Marseilles, Daba and his friends find out they’ve been awarded scholarships to attend school in France.

The book has no plot to speak of – it’s just an account of Daba’s childhood. Published in 1970, those happy-go-lucky days are likely a thing of the past for anyone currently living in the Central African Republic, which has endured many years of civil war in the recent past. It has been called the worst country in the world for young people, and it is also the unhealthiest country, according to researchers at the University of Seattle.

Considering the dire condition in which the Central African Republic currently exists, Daba’s Travels from Ouadda to Bangui serves as a sad reminder of the country’s good old days. The author is fortunate to have grown up there when he did.

COOK

Many of the meals Bamboté wrote about in Daba’s Travels from Ouadda to Bangui were heavily meat-based, and hunting was a favorite pastime in the villages Daba visited. Food crops and fruit trees were mentioned too, however – manioc, corn, papayas, mangos, guavas, oranges, groundnuts (peanuts), and bananas. In fact, when Daba goes away to boarding school, he often skips the school meals and “lived mostly off the fruit he had gathered from the guava and papaya trees where he did his homework.”

Of all the vegan or veganizable recipes I found online for the Central African Republic, the one that appealed to me the most was the one for this sweet peanut butter rice dish that I found on the Global Table Adventure website. Apparently, peanut butter is a staple of Central African Republic cuisine. This dish could not have been any more simple to make, and it was really good. I had it for breakfast, and it was a great way to start the day!

GIVE

There were no projects listed for the Central African Republic on the GlobalGiving website, so I had to do a little digging to find an organization for my donation to this country. I discovered Water for Good, which is working to bring clean water to the people of the Central African Republic through the drilling, servicing, and rehabilitating of wells. This organization works with local water businesses in order to ensure that the wells will be sustainable in the long-term. More information about Water for Good is available at https://waterforgood.org/.

After I’d made my donation, I came across a very recent article on UNICEF’s website about the vast numbers of people from the Central African Republic who are currently fleeing the violence caused by armed groups that control much of the country. According to the article, “These past months and weeks have seen horrendous reports on children’s rights violations. Precise numbers are impossible to know but we know for a fact that children have been killed; there have been incidents of sexual violence, and that recruitment into armed groups is happening. But there are less direct violations with lasting consequences – having to flee or take refuge in the bush; having no education or health care.” For that reason, I decided to also make a donation to UNICEF to help the children of this troubled country.

NEXT STOP: CHAD

CAPE VERDE

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One of the joys of this global reading project is learning about countries I’ve never had occasion to think about before. With a country like Cape Verde, this meant searching my desktop globe to find out where in the world it is. As it turns out, Cape Verde is a small group of islands located off the western coast of Africa, just across from Senegal and Mauritania. It was formerly a colony of Portugal, so the official language is Portuguese. Trying to find a novel from Cape Verde that’s been translated from Portuguese into English is difficult, so as far as I know, pretty much everyone who has embarked on a project like this one ends up reading The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, by Germano Almeida.

This book tells the story of Napumoceno da Silva Araújo, who has just died at a ripe old age and left a 387-page will that must be read aloud by a notary to the assembled witnesses and hopeful beneficiaries. Senhor da Silva Araújo, who is referred to throughout the book as Sr. Napumoceno, has always had a reputation as a successful businessman, straightlaced in both his personal and professional life. His nephew Carlos, assuming that he will inherit Sr. Napumoceno’s entire estate, takes great pains to plan the funeral exactly the way his uncle has requested.

However, the bulk of the estate has been left, not to Carlos, but to Sr. Napumoceno’s daughter, who had been born out-of-wedlock twenty-five years earlier. Her existence was a big surprise to everyone attending the reading of the will, because “who would ever have dreamed that Napumoceno da Silva Araújo would be capable of taking advantage of the days his cleaning woman came to the office to engage in a little hanky-panky, in the corners of the room and on top of the desk…”.

Sr. Napumoceno’s will, as well as several boxes of notebooks in which he has written, provide a wealth of information about the man he really was. We learn of his accidental successes in business, his dabbling in philanthropy and politics, and his social awkwardness. His daughter, Maria da Graça, attempts to find a woman named Adélia, who may have been the great love of Sr. Napumoceno’s life. Maria’s hope is that Adélia “could shed light on just who that man really was who had sired her on an office desk.”

In the end, both Maria and the reader come to know Sr. Napumoceno through his will and his other writings, which strip away almost every layer of the person he believed himself to be.

COOK

Food didn’t play a big role in The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, and the food that was mentioned wasn’t vegan. So I went to Google and found a dish called cachupa that’s famous in the islands of Cape Verde. Cachupa is a stew made with corn or hominy, beans, potatoes, and other vegetables. It usually contains meat or fish, but I found a vegan recipe on the Global Table Adventure website. Mine turned out to be more of a soup than a stew, which means I probably should have cooked it a little longer, but it was dinnertime and I was hungry. The only seasoning the recipe calls for is paprika, but I thought it needed salt, so I added some to the pot. It was a tasty and satisfying dish, although more suited to winter than summer.

GIVE

There were no projects listed for Cape Verde on the GlobalGiving website, so I took to Google to see what I could find. What I found was the Turtle Foundation. Apparently, Cape Verde has the third largest population of nesting loggerhead turtles in the world, but they are in danger from poachers and from problems associated with hotel construction to bring more tourism to the islands. Turtle Foundation has sent in monitors and set up patrols to help stop the slaughter of the turtles. They are also collecting data and tagging turtles for further study. More information about Turtle Foundation’s Project Cape Verde is available at https://www.turtle-foundation.org/en/project-cape-verde/.

NEXT STOP: CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

CANADA

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If you enter the term “Canadian novelist” into Google’s search engine, a seemingly endless number of names come up, making it very difficult to narrow down the choices to just one book for Canada. I’m not quite sure how I picked Lauren B. Davis’ Our Daily Bread from the myriad books that were available to me. However, it turned out to be a timely, if sobering, selection, addressing such topical themes as bullying and isolation, as well as the tendency to ignore problems confronting other people if you can somehow convince yourself that the “otherness” in those people make them less deserving of your help.

The book is set in the fictional town of Gideon and on the mountain, known as North Mountain, nearby. North Mountain is home to the Erskine clan, who have lived there for generations. In the world of the Erskines, the children are savagely abused -- physically, psychologically, and sexually -- but they are taught from birth that “Erskines don’t talk and Erskines don’t leave.” While the Erskines are fictional, I was horrified to learn in the book’s acknowledgements that they are based on a real-life family, the Goler clan of the eastern Canada province of Nova Scotia.

The townspeople of Gideon stay away from the North Mountain people, for the most part, although some drive up under cover of darkness to buy the product of the Erskines’ newly-established meth lab, and some are complicit in the abuse of the children. Most of the “good” people of Gideon, though, are content to simply look down their noses at the North Mountain people.

There are three unlikely heroes in the book, whose lives intersect at a time when the children of North Mountain need help the most. Albert Erskine lives on North Mountain in the Erskine compound, but at twenty-two years of age, is no longer subject to the same abuse as the Erskine children, and he hasn’t adopted the unspeakable habits of the older Erskines. Tom Evans has lived in Gideon his whole life and is a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. Many years earlier, he married a much younger woman whom he met in New York, and it seems the whole town knows things about her that his love blinds him to, making him a frequent topic of gossip. Dorothy Carlisle is my favorite character, a widow who owns an antique shop and is friendly, but generally doesn’t involve herself overly much in the lives of the people in town. By the end of the book, all three of these characters discover inner reserves of strength and purpose that they didn’t know they possessed.

The subject matter could have made it impossible to stomach Our Daily Bread, but the author’s skillful storytelling drew me in. It’s a reminder that evil can’t be swept under the rug, no matter how much we’d like to pretend it doesn’t exist.

COOK

Canada is just across the northern border of the United States, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Canadians eat many of the same things that people in the U.S. do. The characters in Our Daily Bread ate things like burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches, and I didn’t see any mention of dishes that were distinctively Canadian. So I turned to Google and found a recipe for Canadian Maple Pie on the UnconventionalBaker.com website. How delicious does that sound?

Really delicious, as it turns out! The recipe is already vegan (and gluten-free, for that matter), so no substitutions were needed. The ingredients listed are for a very small pie, though, so if you intend to share it and not just eat it all yourself, you’ll need to triple the ingredients for a regular-sized pie.

GIVE

Since the abuse of children was the great evil in Our Daily Bread, I looked on the GlobalGiving website for a project or organization that would benefit children. I found the Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada, which provides “a safe, supportive place where Canadian children and youth can go to experience new opportunities, overcome barriers, build positive relationships and develop confidence and skills for life.” Homework help, healthy meals, and a safe space are just a few of the benefits the Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada offer. More information about this organization is available at https://www.bgccan.com/en/.

NEXT STOP: CAPE VERDE

The Booktrekker is taking a short break, and here's why.

I'm reading baby books to this little guy for a couple of weeks!

Blogging will resume in mid-August.