Monthly Archives: February 2010

February 26, 2010 · 2:45 pm

In Which I Attempted To Master the Fine Art of Toaster Oven Cake [Cake Fail.]

I am an excellent cook.

 It’s true. Sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade, and I know my way around a kitchen. This is due largely to the fact that all of the women in my family are fantastic cooks-and I grew up spending vast amounts of time in the kitchen with my Mom (a woman who makes the most divine homemade Chicago-style deep dish pizza that you have ever had in your life.) I spent most of my growing up years living in countries with no boxed mixes, thus, I learned to cook without the shortcuts we have become so accustomed to as Americans. Icing in a little plastic tub? Not even an option for us. Cinnamon rolls in a tube? …come again? I didn’t even know what “break and bake” cookies were until I was at least fourteen. Once when I was about eight and my family was living in Ukraine, someone sent us a box with Hamburger Helper in it. My brothers and I staged a protest and refused to eat dinner that night.

 We’re food snobs. In my family, you risk a world of shame being heaped on your head if you attempt to buy a pre-made Pillsbury pie crust from the grocery store. Soup is never from a can, pizza is never frozen before you eat it, and every cake devoured at my house (and believe me, there are many) is spread with Mom’s frosting-not Duncan Hines. If you have to rip open a bag, pry the lid off of a jar, or the “recipe” tells you to add three eggs, some water and oil-the odds are, you’re just not cooking, baby!

 Yes, I’m a food snob through-and-through. …or I was.

 But then I moved to Africa.

 If you’ve seen any of my pictures or heard any of my stories, the odds are that you already know that I live in a one room studio apartment with no kitchen. I do all of my cooking on a two-burner hot plate that routinely blows the electricity-and so as of late, I’ve been down to using one burner. (And that’s only AFTER I unplug the mini-fridge and turn off all of the lights.) In an incredibly endearing effort to enable me to cook more, the men on my team bought Christy and I a toaster oven for Christmas. Because Ben’s birthday is tomorrow, I decided to try and make a cake.

 I swallowed my pride and started with a “Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Fudge Marble” cake mix that Dayton had stashed away for a rainy day. (And given the fact that it has rained for all of five minutes in the four months that we’ve lived in Senegal, he decided that we should go ahead and use it.)  The “recipe” called for three eggs (which, by the way, there were pictures of incase I’d forgotten what one looked like), a cup and a half of water, and 3/4 cups of oil.  (Also pictured. Thank you Duncan Hines.)  A picture is worth a thousand words, and I’m going to let mine show you the travesty that ensued on Wednesday afternoon…

Step one: preheat the "oven". Utilize google to figure out what on earth 350 degrees Farenheit is in Celsius.

Step two: Mix the four (?!) cake ingredients together, and then consult the back of the box for instructions on how to swirl. ...seriously?

Step three: ...put the cake into the toaster.

Step four: twenty minutes later, get prematurely excited about the fact that it's starting to smell like cake.

Step five: become alarmed when five minutes later, you smell burning. Remove the cake from the toaster, and discover that the middle is a lovely charred black, while the outside have not even begun bake.

Step five: six and a half minutes after that, when the distinct smell of burning starts wafting through the apartment, RUN to the toaster. Discover that the middle of your cake is a charred black lump, and the outsides are entirely raw. Perfect.

Step six: reconcile yourself to the unfortunate reality that just as cakes were not meant to be comprised of only four ingredients, they were also not meant to be baked in toasters.

Step six: reconcile yourself to the unfortunate reality that, just as cakes were not meant to be comprised of only four ingredients, they were also not meant to be baked in a toaster oven.

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Filed under My ghetto-fab life, Team

February 24, 2010 · 11:53 pm

There Is a Deeper Magic…

“If the Witch knew the true meaning of sacrifice, she might have interpreted the deep magic differently. That when a willing victim who has committed no treachery, is killed in a traitor’s stead, the stone table will crack, and even death itself would turn backwards.”

–Aslan, from The Chronicles of Narnia

Yesterday, my team and I watched Narnia with some of our students. I’ve read the book countless times and seen the movie even more-…but never before has the story gripped me in such an intensely personal way.

You know the story. The White Witch has cast an evil spell over the magical land of Narnia-making it always winter, and never Christmas. Those who oppose her are turned to stone, and Narnia is devoid of all joy and life. What was created as paradise has become a frigid wasteland.

Sometimes, Senegal feels like that Narnia.

In the movie, Mr. Tumnus describes a different Narnia to Lucy-the Narnia that Aslan (the Christ-figure in the story) created.

Lucy: Winter isn’t all bad. There’s ice skating and snow ball fights. Oh! And Christmas!

Tumnus: We haven’t had Christmas in a hundred years here.

Lucy: (shocked) No presents for a hundred years?

Tumnus: But, oh, you would have loved Narnia in spring! The Dryads and the Fauns would dance all night… but we never got tired. And oh, the music! Such music.

I don’t know what Senegal was like before the spiritual winter that has such rigid grip on this country took hold. I don’t know what music was like before the mournful melody of the mosque. What did Senegal look like before fear replaced joy? Before condemnation replaced grace?

With Esperence, Jessica and Fatou Bintou right before we started Narnia.

I don’t know. But here’s the beautiful thing: there is a deeper magic at work in Senegal. I don’t spend my days talking about the gospel with students to help God win some sort of battle-I spend my days talking about the gospel because He has already won it! I get to talk with students about what has already been done.   And last night, I got to talk with some of my girls about the “deeper magic” that has radically, forever changed every nuance of my life: grace. The gospel is that my sin is great-but God’s love is greater still! God saw me, hopelessly lost in sin, and ransomed me from death and darkness at an unimaginable  cost.  What unexpected, undeserved grace. I am far more loved and cherished than I can imagine-and so are you! That ought to permeate and change every aspect of our lives.

We don’t have to live in perpetual winter, under the icy reign of the White Witch. We need only recognize that Aslan has already brought Spring back to Narnia. He has already won.

Some of our students watching Narnia.

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Filed under God's faithfulness, Ministry moments, Senegal, Team

February 23, 2010 · 10:57 am

The God-shaped Vacuum [Faith is a Romance.]

 One of the fascinating things about life as an American in Africa, is that I have the unique opportunity to define the finer points of American culture for my students. For instance: as of November 26, 2009, there are approximately fifteen Senegalese students wandering around Dakar that believe that a traditional American Thanksgiving consists of unusually dry rotisserie chicken, lumpy mashed potatoes and a viewing of The Passion of the Christ. [Butterball Turkey and the Macy’s day parade have nothing on us!]

Yesterday, I got to share one of my favorite aspects of American culture: coffee! Clearly, Americans do not have the market cornered on coffee, but the Senegalese are even farther off than we are. Their preferred coffee drink [café touba] can be purchased at rusty little rolling stands that precariously teeter down the side of the road. Café touba is served in tiny, brown plastic cups, and is the equivalent of a shot of grainy Nescafe sludge with enough sugar in it to throw you into immediate diabetic shock. It is positively undrinkable even in the direst of circumstances. I went my first two weeks in-country without even a sip of coffee, which will put this in perspective for anyone that knows me! I digress.

Bineta and I with our coffee. ...clearly, I had already had some and she had not.

Bineta came over yesterday for a “traditional American lunch” [read: egg salad sandwiches and French fries.] and help deciphering Shakespeare’s Othello [which she is reading in English]. Can you imagine reading Shakespeare in a foreign language? I love theatre, and it was fun getting to explain some of the themes and translate old English words for her over a cup of vanilla hazelnut crème coffee. One of the weightier themes in Othello is betrayal-a topic that sadly resonates with almost every single one of my girls.As Bineta and I began to discuss betrayal [specifically in regards to romantic relationships], something in her demeanor changed. You see, my girls grow up expecting betrayal in a way that you and I do not. There is an odd tension when you discuss romantic relationships with a Senegalese woman like Bineta. They really love talking about romantic relationships-partially because they all want one, and partially because they’re all afraid of them in light of what they’ve seen their mothers endure. Almost without exception, my girls expects to be abused, cheated on, and eventually left. They live with the reality that if their husbands can afford more than one wife, they will be one of many. A girl named Sophie articulated the general sentiment well when she confided that she would “never give her whole heart to a man, because he would only break it.”

It might sound simplistic, but to a Muslim woman, the idea that God treasures her, delights in her, rejoices over her with singing and is passionately, relentlessly pursuing her, is entirely new. It stands in breathtaking contrast with the graceless, fear-based, legalistic religion that she has known since she was a little girl-and with the romantic relationships that she has both observed and experienced. Faith is a romance-I am Christ’s bride, not His captive.

Yesterday, as I began to describe my walk with Jesus as a reaction to a torrent of unconditional love that I could never begin to deserve, I saw Bineta’s eyes visibly brighten. That’s a love that she has never experienced-or even seen-and just like you and I, she was created for it. 

“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, which cannot be satisfied by any created thing.” –Blaise Pascal

Pray that Bineta comes to understand this.

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Filed under Cross cultural moments, Epiphanies, God's faithfulness, Ministry moments, Senegalese culture

February 20, 2010 · 10:14 pm

Of Dirty Laundry and Dead Pigeons. [Errands.]

Living in a third world country means that the simplest of things that used to take three and a half minutes are guaranteed to run you no less than three and a half hours. Errands that used to take me no time at all in Chapel Hill have evolved into all-day affairs. My least favorite of these is laundry.

In an enthusiastic effort to live like a local (…or possibly because we have no other choice) my team and I wash all of our clothes by hand -which has several rather unfortunate ramifications:

  1. Given the fact that we all hate taking four hours to do our laundry, we routinely run out of clean clothes.
  2. “Clean” has become a very fluid concept-…none of us have been truly clean since we left the US.
  3. We are all developing carpel tunnel from wringing out water-logged  jeans and t-shirts into the sink.

Christy helped capture today’s laundry escapade on film.

Laundry time.

I don't know why on earth I'm smiling-I really do hate doing laundry here. It must have been all of the Michael Buble blaring in the background. (Somebody's got to drown out the mosque...)

I dearly miss my washing machine!

Several hours after doing laundry, I was reminded of how much I miss Harris Teeter when I discovered this in the grocery store…

Pigeon, anyone?

In our “cross cultural training”, we were repeatedly told to remember that “it’s not wrong, it’s just different.”

I’d like to submit that eating pigeon for dinner is, infact, wrong.

Note: we normally don’t shop at the grocery store. We try to buy most of our food at open air markets like this…

A typical African market.

I still haven’t worked up to buying a live chicken and turning it into pot pie. Baby steps. (And you can just forget about the pigeon.)

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Filed under Cross cultural hilarity, My ghetto-fab life

· 12:36 am

Out to Lunch

As the days march on in Senegal, I find myself looking at things a lot differently than I did during my first several weeks in Dakar. I remember stepping off of the airplane into what felt like a giant vat of pea soup (read: Dakar is hotter than hell), and within minutes feeling entirely overwhelmed. Cash and I were almost thrown out of the country before they ever let us through customs! (Note: the next time you fly into Senegal, make sure you have the address for where you’ll be staying in the city. If all else fails, make one up—thank goodness this worked for us on October 25th, 2009!) Once we DID get through customs, my bags were immediately grabbed by burly Senegalese men that proceeded to demand that I give them twenty dollars for spending thirty seconds grabbing bags that I never wanted them to touch. (Even then, I was aware enough to barter. More on my love of getting a deal in Senegal later!) I hesitantly stepped out of the decrepit airport into a world that was nothing like the one I had just come from. Pristine, preppy Chapel Hill was nothing like the city that suddenly surrounded me. Desperate hands eagerly shook refurbished odds and ends for sale in front of my very confused face, as cries of “Taxi? Taxi?” lingered in the air. And there, amidst the filth and refuse that I would soon find to be a hallmark of Dakar, I stood in my cowgirl boots, holding on to my royal blue, monogrammed duffle bag for dear life and desperately wishing I could find an iced caramel latte. We have a word for that girl in Senegal-natives would call her a “Toubob”-literally meaning “You’re white” in wolof. The past four months of my life have been a wildly entertaining and sometimes excruciatingly painful process of having the “Toubob” beaten out of me. And as the weeks have turned into months, the city has changed to me. Things that were once shocking and disgusting have become normal, and even fun.

 Today, Christy and I took three of our girls to get Senegalese food at a Mom and Pop place that we probably hit three times a week. (If the pictures surprise you, you might be interested to learn that this is one of the nicer Senegalese places to eat in our neighborhood.) A sweet little old lady named Michelle spends every morning cooking up several enormous pots of food, and then serves it until it runs out. I don’t care how hard you try, you can’t spend more than $2.50 on your meal. My favorite Senegalese dish is called “Tiébou Yopp”-take a look.

Tiébou Yopp

If Michelle has made Tiébou Yopp, when she sees me walk in she brings it to me without ever taking my order. (Not that there are any menus available anyhow. :))

 These sweet girls are new friends of mine-between them and another girl that Christy and I met with today, we got to share the gospel in three different languages! (English, Spanish and French.) The Spanish was all Christy-I can’t speak a word of it. I should note that the Spanish was a first–we work exclusively in English and French.

(From left to right) meet Oumy, Thioro, and Amy Faye.

Outside of the "resturaunt".

Not all of the toubob has been beaten out of me yet…I’d still kill for that iced caramel latte. ;)

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Filed under Cross cultural hilarity, Ministry moments, My ghetto-fab life, Senegalese culture, Team