BELGIUM

READ

For Belgium, I read The Misfortunates, by Dimitri Verhulst. “Misfortunate” isn’t even listed in my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, so I went to the Internet to see what it means (although I had a pretty good idea). According to oxforddictionaries.com, “misfortunate” is a Scottish term meaning “an unfortunate person.”

With such a sad-sounding title, I had hoped this book would be purely a work of fiction. But no – it’s a semi-autobiographical novel. In fact, the dedication reads, in part: “And in memory of my grandmother, who wanted to avoid the shame and died while I was completing the last pages of the manuscript.” Honestly, faced with this much gloom before I’d even read a word of the first chapter, I’m surprised I followed through with it.

As I got into it, though, it wasn’t an especially sad book, at least not in the sense that it made me want to cry. It’s a series of vignettes about four brothers (three adults and one teenager) living in the fictional town of Arsendegem, Belgium, with their mother and Dimitri, the 13-year-old son of one of the brothers. Dimitri is the book’s narrator, and these vignettes are woven together loosely to tell the story of his coming of age among four men whose lives revolve around alcohol and other vices. Mostly alcohol, though.

When Dimitri is born, his father is at one of the local pubs and doesn’t make it to the hospital in time for the birth. When he finally arrives on a bicycle, inebriated, he snatches baby Dimitri up, loads him onto the bicycle, and takes him to all his favorite pubs to show him to his friends. More drinking ensues, and it’s a miracle that Dimitri is returned to the hospital in one piece by his father later that night.

Some chapters in the book are comical, such as the one detailing the family’s obsession with the music of Roy Orbison, and others are poignant, like the one in which Dimitri, now an adult, visits his grandmother in the nursing home where she is in the advanced stages of dementia. The reader follows Dimitri’s father’s journey to the rehab clinic to try to take control of his drinking, and Dimitri’s unhappiness about becoming a father himself. Throughout the book, there is an air of fatalism, a feeling among the characters that their lot in life is simply to drink, smoke, and carouse until cancer or some other illness kills them.

Dimitri’s life doesn’t follow the pattern of the other men in the family, but the scars from his earlier years are apparent in the writing. Also apparent, however, is his great affection for those men. As an adult who has long since moved away from Arsendegem, he writes, “The misfortunate have a more realistic view of the world; my love for my uncles is vast and incomprehensible, but no one has ever had the gall to demand comprehensibility of love.”

COOK

Food was mentioned occasionally in The Misfortunates, but nothing sounded very good, and practically nothing was vegan or veganizable, although one of Dimitri’s uncles did joke, “Next thing they’ll come up with meat-free meat.” Mostly, the men in the family just drank. As Dimitri said of his father, “The years in which he dutifully drank himself into serial oblivion had robbed him of his appetite.”

That left me free to search the Internet for any Belgian recipes I could veganize, and the Belgian potato soup recipe I found on the Recipes Wiki website looked perfect. I substituted margarine for the butter and vegetable broth for the chicken stock, of course, but I wasn’t sure how to replace the light cream. One website suggested blending silken tofu until smooth, so that’s what I did. I also added salt and pepper. The soup was delicious, and I’m sure it will become a winter favorite for me.

GIVE

Women did not fare well in The Misfortunates. The only man in Dimitri’s family who appeared to have had a relationship of any duration with a woman was his dad, and that didn’t end happily. Attractive women were objectified, and the men didn't consider most other women worth discussing. The whole lot of Verhulst men seemed to go back and forth between being misogynists and simply not being interested in anything that wasn’t booze.

In choosing an organization for this week’s donation, I decided to get back at this old boys’ club by giving my money to a group that helps girls. Greenlight for Girls, which I found through the GlobalGiving website, "holds one-day, girl-focused events to show the fun in math, science, engineering and technology through hands-on workshops run by role-models in STEM fields." The events are offered in Brussels free of charge, and the organization reaches out to girls in low-income neighborhoods especially. More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/inspire-girls-in-hands-on-science-around-the-world/.

NEXT STOP: BELIZE

BELARUS

READ

Both the title and the note preceding the text were strong clues that I was in for some heavy reading when I picked up Paranoia, by Victor Martinovich. The note at the beginning of the book reads:

“All the events related herein are fictional: the protagonists have never existed in any reality other than that of the present text. Any unsanctioned comparisons with historical figures or persons alive today may be qualified as a criminal offense punishable under international and national law. To avoid unintentionally committing acts prosecutable under the Penal Code, the author – fully aware that, essentially, he should never have written it in the first place – enjoins readers not to read this book.”

Indeed, according to the book’s foreword, Paranoia was pulled from the shelves only two days after its release in Belarus, and the author is living in exile. Belarus is a former republic of the Soviet Union, and the people of that country are still subject to many Soviet-era policies and practices.

The book features a pair of young lovers in the Belarusian capital of Minsk who are caught up in an unfortunate love triangle, with the third member of the triangle being the country’s leader. This would be a problem even in a democracy, but under an authoritarian government where the president is essentially a dictator, it’s a recipe for disaster.

The book’s protagonist, Anatoly, is a writer of some acclaim. He leads a rather mundane life in Minsk until the day he spots Lisa in a local café. They meet and fall in love, but it’s not long until Lisa confesses to Anatoly that she’s the mistress of the country’s president. In addition to the turmoil this causes in their relationship, it creates an upheaval in other aspects of Anatoly’s life, as he suddenly becomes a person of interest to the country’s state security police. Everything comes to a head when Lisa, who has just revealed that she’s pregnant, disappears and is presumed from the bloody evidence left behind to have been murdered.

I thought the circumstances of the blossoming relationship between Anatoly and Lisa were unconvincing, and the characters’ dialogue was much too flowery and scripted. Martinovich’s descriptions of life in an authoritarian state, however, seemed chillingly authentic. Timothy Snyder’s foreword to the book describes a country in which “all that is not expressly permitted is forbidden,” and in which repressive policies of the former Soviet Union are still in effect. One passage in the book sums up the situation this way:

“The German press agent who handled his work had once said, ‘What’s distinctive about the present epoch is that nowadays anti-utopias can be based on entirely factual material. There’s no more need to invent 1984: just look around.’”

In Paranoia, Martinovich paints a stark portrait of Belarus as just such an anti-utopia. As the old saying goes, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

COOK

I wasn’t sure I’d find any good food references in a book about such a dark subject. After all, who can think about food when they’re being targeted by the brutal state security police? Happily, there were a few decent food mentions, including a reference to pelmeni dumplings. Anatoly and Lisa had rented a small apartment, with a kitchen about which Anatoly says, “The ceiling lights, the clumsy dripping faucet, the ceramic boot full of burned matches, the range hood with its broken clock, the kitchen cupboards with bay leaves, coriander, and black pepper ready at any moment to help us boil up pelmeni meat dumplings…”.   

I found a recipe for pelmeni on a website called Dacha 2 Table. I substituted flaxseed meal and water for the egg in the dough recipe, and substituted Beyond Meat beef crumbles for the meat in the filling. The recipe suggested serving the pelmeni with vodka sauce or sour cream, so I opted for vegan sour cream. I also cooked the filling before putting it in the dumpling.

They look beautiful, but considering how much work they were, I wish I liked them better.

GIVE

When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster occurred in 1986, 70 percent of the radiation fallout fell on Belarus. The health effects to the people there have been severe and long-lasting, resulting in an outpouring of support from people around the world, especially directed toward the children of Belarus. Dozens of organizations arrange for children to travel to other countries during the summers or to uncontaminated areas of Belarus, where the children receive medical attention and spend time in a clean, healthy environment. One such group, which received my donation for Belarus, is the American Belarussian Relief Organization. ABRO has brought more than 5,000 children from Belarus to the United States “for rest and medical evaluation. Another 400 children have benefited from the summer camps held in the uncontaminated region of Belarus.” More information about this organization is available on their website at http://www.abro.org/.

NEXT STOP: BELGIUM

BARBADOS

  

READ

When I was making my list of books to read for each country, I noticed that it was pretty heavily weighted toward male authors. With that in mind, I actively sought out women writers to balance out my reading. My research led me to a woman author named Karen Lord from Barbados, and that was how I came to read a completely different type of novel for this country, an island in the Caribbean, than I have been reading for other countries.

Lord’s novel, Redemption in Indigo, is a work of speculative fiction, although I would simply have called it a folk tale. It’s the story of a woman of good character named Paama, who is an excellent cook. Unfortunately, her husband Ansije is a glutton, and no matter how much food Paama makes for him, it is never enough. Paama finally decides to leave him and go back to her parents’ home. They, in turn, move the family back to their ancestral village in order to put some distance between Paama and Ansije.

As the narrator points out, however, “… Ansije was not the villain of the story. He was the joker, the momentary hindrance, the test of character for Paama’s growth and learning.” And since this is a folk tale, many of the book’s characters are not human. They are djombis, also known as the undying. As with humans, there are good djombis and bad djombis. There are also djombis who used to be benevolent towards humans, but who have since developed a less helpful attitude.

One such djombi, whose name is Indigo, has become particularly troublesome, so his djombi superiors have decided he needs to be taught a lesson. Because of her strength of character, they choose Paama to be their instrument in teaching Indigo that lesson.

Redemption in Indigo explores the choices people make, both good and bad. On the one hand, Ansije’s gluttony is “… truly the bathos of human experience, a gift of life and opportunity squandered and spoiled.” Paama’s character, on the other hand, is described thus: “Nothing stopped her from trying to do what she felt to be right, not even despair.”

I enjoyed the author’s wit and her ability to turn a phrase. Ansije’s “mother had been the daughter of a minor chief, and she had carefully instilled in Ansije an understanding of the importance of importance,” was one observation that made me laugh, especially considering all the stars of pop culture to whom that phrase might apply. All in all, this novel made for very enjoyable reading.

COOK

Although the author is from Barbados, the setting for Redemption in Indigo is a fictional country, with made-up towns and villages, so the food mentioned in the book wasn’t necessarily the food of Barbados. One thing that came up more than once, however, and seemed like something that could probably be found anywhere in the Caribbean, was a drink Paama had when she visited the House of the Sisters:

“Within an hour or so, Paama was sitting on a mat before a low table set with simple but delicious refreshments: fruit, soft cheese, semisweet cakes laden with nuts, and the drink the House had made famous – lime juice with just the right proportions of mint and ginger.”

I found a recipe at myrecipes.com that sounded exactly like what Sister Jani served Paama, and it was fabulous!

 

Just in case the ginger limeade isn’t actually something one would drink in Barbados, I decided to try another recipe too. Cou cou, made of okra and cornmeal, is apparently one of the national dishes of Barbados. The recipe I used was from a website called Caribbeanchoice.com. Since I couldn’t find fresh okra, I had to use frozen. It never thickened up the way it was supposed to, but it would make a decent side dish.

  GIVE

My donation for Barbados is going to Variety the Children’s Charity, an organization with chapters all over the world. The chapter in Barbados is “committed to supporting the children of Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, especially those who are sick, physically or mentally challenged, through the improvement of the care given to them and the quality of their lives in general.” More information about Variety the Children’s Charity of Barbados is available at http://varietybarbados.org/.

  

NEXT STOP: BELARUS

BANGLADESH

READ

For Bangladesh, I was planning to read Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim. But just as I finished the first few pages, I found out that it was a sequel to Anam’s first novel, A Golden Age. So I stopped reading The Good Muslim (for now), and picked up A Golden Age.

The book opens with widow Rehana Haque losing her children in a court proceeding in 1959. Her husband has died suddenly, and his brother Faiz is able to convince the court that Rehana doesn’t have the wherewithal to care for them properly. He and his wife take the children from their home in Dhaka, East Pakistan, to Faiz’s home in Lahore, West Pakistan.

Fast forward to 1971. Rehana’s children, Sohail and Maya, have long since been returned to her. They go to school at the local university, where they are involved in the Bangladesh independence movement. At that time, Bangladesh was part of the Dominion of Pakistan and was known as East Pakistan. Sohail and Maya are optimistic about the results of the recent election, but things aren’t happening the way they expected them to happen.

A near riot at a cricket match that she and her family attend gives Rehana a scare, but she is able to convince herself that everything will be fine: “… suddenly Rehana felt sure it would all resolve itself: Sheikh Mujib would be Prime Minister, and the country would go on being her home, and the children would go on being her children. In no time at all the world would right itself, and they would go on living ordinary, unexceptional lives.”

That is not the case, however, and when the city is suddenly invaded by the Pakistani army, everyone is caught completely off-guard. Rehana’s children become immersed in the resistance movement, and because they are her children, Rehana becomes involved too. She helps Sohail and his friends hide weapons and an injured comrade, and later, she travels to Calcutta, where Maya helps out in a refugee camp. The descriptions of the refugee camp and its inhabitants are particularly poignant.

While the book’s plot centers around the fight for independence for Bangladesh, it is also a book about love – romantic love, love for one’s country, but most of all, a mother’s love for her children. I’m happy to know that there is a sequel, because I’m not yet ready to say goodbye to these characters, and I’m looking forward to reading more of this author’s beautiful writing.

COOK

In many of the books I’ve read for this global reading project, I can’t find even one mention of a dish to cook from that country. I had the opposite problem with A Golden Age. There were so many mouth-watering foods described that I had trouble making up my mind which to choose. Dal, biryani, samosas, puris – I wanted it all.

In the end, what I wanted the most was beguni, battered and fried eggplant slices. Rehana makes this dish during Ramadan, an Islamic observance requiring fasting from sunup to sundown, as part of the meal she and Maya will eat after the sun goes down. She knows that Sohail and his friends are out on a dangerous mission, and that occupies her mind while she cooks.

“The fear breathed on her neck and sent the hair upright, electric. It caught her in the double-beat of her heart, the pulse she could feel at her temple, the tremor of her hand as she fried the Iftar food. Beguni, the crunchy strips of eggplant. Chickpeas and tomatoes. The dalpuri Maya had rolled out and stuffed. Orange juice. Tamarind juice. Lassi. It was not elaborate enough for a special occasion, not simple enough to indicate want. A meal for an ordinary day. A meal for a day without war.”

I found the recipe on a blog called Rownak’s Bangla Recipes, which says that beguni is very popular for Ramadan, although eggplant becomes very expensive during that time. The recipe is already vegan, so I didn’t have to make any substitutions for that reason. I couldn’t find carom seeds, which are from the same family as caraway seeds, so I substituted caraway instead. The beguni was tasty, although I’d probably use a little less water in the batter next time, and a little more salt.

GIVE

I had assumed that my donation for Bangladesh would go to the Grameen Foundation, which was inspired by Mohammed Yunus, a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microcredit and microfinance. However, the Grameen Foundation didn’t seem to have any way for me to earmark my donation for Bangladesh, so I went back to my old stand-by, GlobalGiving.org. They had many projects listed in Bangladesh, but the one that caught my eye, because of Rehana’s devotion to her children, was the Mothers’Clubs in Bangladesh, established by the Hope Foundation for Women &Children of Bangladesh. The purpose of these clubs is to provide mothers with health education, especially information about preventative healthcare, so they can better help their families. More information about the Mothers’ Clubs in Bangladesh is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/help-mothers-clubs-for-one-year/.

NEXT STOP: BARBADOS

BAHRAIN

READ

This week’s blog post is about Bahrain, a small island in the Persian Gulf with a population that’s predominantly Muslim. The book I read was Yummah, by Sarah A. Al Shafei, and it tells the story of Khadeeja, beginning with her marriage at the age of twelve.

Khadeeja’s mother, a widow, arranges for her to marry Mohammed, a man several years her senior whom Khadeeja has never met. Her mother is eager for the wedding to take place because she herself has a terminal illness, and she wants to make sure someone is there to take care of Khadeeja after she dies. Khadeeja pours out her thoughts on the upcoming wedding to her doll Layla, who remains her confidant throughout her life.

Khadeeja is happy in her marriage, and she and her husband have eight children. When she is pregnant with her ninth child, however, she is suddenly abandoned by Mohammed, who until that moment has been a model husband. The rest of the book follows Khadeeja’s efforts in raising her children without any support from Mohammed.

One interesting aspect of the book is watching the way customs and mores change over the years. Khadeeja marries off her first daughter at the age of twelve, just as she was married. But her second daughter decides to quit school and go to work in a beauty salon to help support the family, something that would have been unheard of a few short years before. All of the children, including (or maybe especially) the girls, become strong and independent. There are quarrels and challenges, but the family bonds remain. By the end of the book, even Mohammed returns to the fold.

While most of the book is focused on Khadeeja’s responsibilities as a wife and mother, one chapter is devoted to a trip she decides to take to Mecca, the holiest city in the Islamic religion. After all the challenges she had faced after Mohammed left, Khadeeja feels the need to heal her soul. She arranges to go with a group of women, not only to Mecca, but to other holy sites as well.

The author’s descriptions of the places visited and Khadeeja’s experiences are beautiful and heartfelt. “The moment I entered the Prophet’s land I felt a shiver in my body, I felt as if the air was hugging me and the vibe filled my heart and soul with love and faith. Everything was different everything was better; the life, the harmony, the land, even the fruits, the dates, the vegetables. The sun was cooler, the moon had a special shine, and the stars had a continuous twinkle.” Khadeeja returns home with a renewed sense of purpose.

The word “Yummah” means grandmother, a tribute to Khadeeja’s long and fulfilling life as her children have children of their own and Khadeeja remains at the center of the family circle. The book presents a lovely portrait of a strong and loving woman and the family she raises on her own.

COOK

One scene in the book describes a family get-together on National Day. They are at a carnival, where sweets and other foods are sold, a puppet show is performed for the children, and the Bahraini National Band plays. As Khadeeja describes it, “It was one of these days that we all waited for. We enjoyed watching all the people in their best from the rooftop. We would take some tea and nuts, biscuits and halwa (a Bahraini sweet).”

So I decided to make halwa for this blog post. I found a recipe for Bahraini halwa on a blog called “Spice Traveller.” It was easy to veganize by replacing the butter with vegan margarine, but it was a tricky recipe to make since I had never dry-fried sugar before and wasn’t sure I was doing it right. I also wasn’t quite sure what cornflour was, so I had to look it up. Apparently, if you live in the United Kingdom or Australia, cornflour means cornstarch, but if you live anywhere else, it’s just cornmeal. At any rate, it all worked out.

GIVE

The organization I chose to receive my donation is Alia for Early Intervention, a program of the Bahrain Society for Children with Behavior and Communication Disorders. Services are available to children who are “at least eighteen months of age at the time of referral, and suspected of developmental delay or diagnosed with a physical or mental condition, resulting in a high probability of delay in the following areas: cognitive development, communication development, social or emotional development, or physical development.” More information about this organization is available at http://www.childbehavior.org/earlyinterventioncenter.html.

  

NEXT STOP: BANGLADESH

THE BAHAMAS

READ

If you’re like me, the only thing you know about the Bahamas is that they are an island paradise in the Caribbean Sea. One reason for undertaking this global reading project is to look beyond the stereotypes and learn about these countries from the perspectives of people who live and work there.

Ian G. Strachan’s novel, God’s Angry Babies, tells the story of a family living in an area of the Bahamas that the tourists don’t see. The family is headed by the formidable Maureen Bodie, who left her good-for-nothing husband and raised their four sons on her own. With a father who doesn’t believe girls need an education and a husband who can’t be bothered to lift a finger on behalf of his wife and children, Maureen has had to carve out her own path to success. With the help of a government scholarship, she takes her young sons abroad with her and earns a college degree. Upon her return to the Bahamas, she gets a job as a vice principal making enough money to have a house built for her family in a nice neighborhood and to pay for a good education for her sons.

Maureen is also politically active, backing the PNF (Progressive National Front) party in the post-colonial Bahamas. When her youngest son Mark (also known as Tree) gets accepted into college abroad, Maureen urges him to talk to their Member of Parliament (MP), also a member of the PNF party, to ensure that he gets a government scholarship. Mark agrees reluctantly, since his political views are more closely aligned with the out-of-power FLP (Free Liberal Party). By requesting the MP’s help, however, Mark is coerced into working on the MP’s election campaign, where political dirty tricks abound.

Racism, sexism, and homophobia are encountered often by characters in this novel, and political corruption is a continuing theme. Through it all, Maureen Bodie’s strength and devotion to her sons provides inspiration to the reader.

I gave this book three stars out of five on GoodReads, not because I didn’t like it, but because of the author’s overuse of colloquial speech to tell the story. While a certain amount of vernacular can help to make the characters come to life, too much can distract from the plot and make it difficult for the reader to understand what the characters are saying. I felt like that’s what happened in this book, where there were entire chapters written in the vernacular. If not for that, I would have given the book four stars.

COOK

I would have expected to find more food descriptions in this novel, but there wasn't much to work with, so I started googling Bahamian recipes instead. I found a recipe for Bahamian-style peas and rice on the allrecipes.com website that seemed to fit the bill. I left out the bacon and replaced the butter with margarine to make it vegan. The only other issue was that the recipe calls for pigeon peas, which I have never seen in any of my local grocery stores. I did a little more searching to see what an acceptable substitute for pigeon peas might be, and found that black-eyed peas would work. This turned out to be a very tasty dish!

GIVE

Now that I've discovered GlobalGiving.org, that's the first place I look when I'm researching organizations to receive my Booktrekker donations. I was happy to find an opportunity there to donate to the Earthwatch Institute, which has projects worldwide that allow people to engage "in scientific field research and education to promote the understanding and action necessary for a sustainable environment." Their project in the Bahamas involves research to help save the habitat of the green sea turtle and the hawksbill sea turtle. More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/saving-sea-turtles-in-the-bahamas-with-earthwatch/.

NEXT STOP: BAHRAIN

The Booktrekker is on vacation

Between holiday celebrations and traveling, I'm going to have to take a break from blogging. Check back again after January 12th. There may be occasional updates on The Booktrekker's Facebook page as well.

https://m.facebook.com/TheBooktrekker/

Happy holidays and good reading to you all!