At the time, I got what she said, but didn’t really agree with her vehemence. I feel differently now. It’s different, being a returned Peace Corps Volunteer, than being a Peace Corps Volunteer. It’s different and the fact that my Peace Corps experiences continue to influence the rest of my life don’t make it the same. It’s connected, sure, but every bit of our lives is connected. You can’t be who you are without having been where you’ve been. And yet the past is still past, and trying to hold on to it too tightly just stagnates the present.

When I made this blog, I was looking at the future, and it’s time to do that again.

Then print out  or copy the recipe here at 101 cookbooks.

This is a wonderful website with amazing dishes I can’t wait to try when I have the ingredients. The only substitution you need to make (besides using lower quality ingredients that still taste good but don’t give you that organic glow) is to use regular cake flour instead of the whole wheat pastry flour. It changes the texture a bit, (because white flour absorbs a different amount of moisture)

So go slow when adding the flour and don’t be afraid to stop or keep going if it doesn’t look right.

Given a lack of counter space and rolling pins and pastry sleeves and all that stuff that makes life easier, you may find it easier to roll the dough into a log, chill it as directed, and then slice off the cookies as thin as you can manage. You end up with something more like thick mints, but that’s ok, too.

Believe me when I say that of the two choices, it was adoption that nearly destroyed me – and it never ends. The only comparison I have is the death of a loved one. The pain retreats, maybe fades, but it comes right back if I poke at it. Writing this has taken me nearly two weeks. Normally, I can write this amount in about thirty minutes, with bathroom breaks. I started to type, and stopped only to reread, then go wail into my pillow. There is no such thing as “over” with this.

Birth mothers are a demographic seldom heard from, and then generally only in the context of how soon they want to “replace” their lost child. This is a huge WTF to me. I went into a self-destructive tailspin for over a decade, and never once thought that maybe a new doll would do the trick. Yet every support group, every online forum, every possible resource I found, all zeroed in on this one-size-fits-all panacea. I didn’t want a new baby. I never wanted any babies in the first place. I also didn’t want an abortion, and I don’t see how any of my reasons for any of this are anyone’s business, either. It was my choice to make, and that is that.

We were meant to go to Robben Island our second day in South Africa. We had also booked it by phone, since the website tells you how to make online bookings but then refuses to actually accept them. We were told that Robben Island is worth going to and books up early. So we did what we were told.

High winds and crazy waves canceled the Robben Island trips, I guess because the powers that be weren’t all that keen on the idea of the tourists vomiting all over their nice boat. Here’s where we get lucky: After wandering around V&A Waterfront, trying to follow the colored trail markers and adjusting tack at every map, we showed up just in time to find out about the cancellation. When we got to the ticket counter, we asked if they were going to have trips on New Years Eve. They were, and they quickly booked us in for that day. The woman who stepped up to a different teller about 30 seconds after we did asked for the same day and was told they were all booked up until 3 January—the day we were traveling back to Malawi.

When the 31st came, we were excited to get on the ferry and watch the movie about Robben Island. The itinerary involves a bus tour of the whole island and then a walking tour of the prison itself. There were separate tour guides for the bus part and the prison part, but all of the tour guides used to be inmates at the prison.

Our guide for the bus had been a prisoner for about 15 years. He told us about the troubles he had after being released from prison. His wife had to “put food on the table” and he never could find the kind of job he was qualified for—even after Mandela was released. One day a friend who was a muckety muck in the ANC and told him that there was a job available that would pay enough that he could support his family again. His kids were so happy, and our guide was pretty excited, but was also pragmatic. “What’s the job?” “You’d be working on Robben Island.” Even after all this time, we could see in his face how difficult it was to make the decision. Either continue to be unemployable, or return to the site of the most miserable years of your life. Every day. Monday through Friday. 9 to 5.

Some of the tour guides live on Robben Island. There’s an Irish charity (or the government? I’m not sure because they’re only ever referred to as “the Irish”) that helped out with building housing and the school the staff members’ children go to. Our guide said that he, too, used to live on the island, but eventually he couldn’t take it anymore and moved off the island so that he would only have to be there during working hours.

We drove past the limestone quarry where Mandela and his compatriots laboured for years and years. The light shined off the limestone so brightly that prisoners and guards alike would have retinal scarring and begin to have declines in their eyesight. The prisoners asked for sunglasses and were refused: not surprising when you consider how inhuman the government considered them. But the guards also requested sunglasses and were refused, because it wasn’t part of the official uniform. Which makes one wonder exactly what the government thought of all people who weren’t at the highest echelons of society.

The prisoners would congregate in a cave in the quarry. It served as a place to rest, away from the blinding glare of the reflected sun; it served as a meeting place where the leaders of the ANC in prison could make plans, get notes to each other, plan the lessons for the next day; it also served as the toilet. It was this last function that was in a way the most important, not just because the smell was nearly overpowering, but also because its final function was why the prisoners could have enough privacy to plot. It was a “Coloured toilet” and as such, whites couldn’t go in there. Not even the guards.

The prison was separated into different sections for different levels of political prisoners. White political prisoners and women political prisoners were sent to different prisons, closer to Jo’burg. So Robben Island had only the “Bantu” and Coloured political prisoners.

It was very important to the Apartheid government that the Coloureds and the Blacks get different treatment even in prison, so there were regulations on everything, including the different amounts and types of food. The ANC didn’t like the idea, so they had the Coloured prisoners and the Blacks on better terms with the prison brass—those who could buy things from the commissary—buy tinned items and special things for everybody. This was, though, only on the days when the prison served food so unpalatable that no one could stand the idea of eating the food served. The regular kind of awful, scheduled into their weekly menus, didn’t count. It had to be a special kind of horrible. On regular days, they would all pool their food and divvy it up equally. They figured the purpose of the Coloureds being allowed coffee at dinner and the Blacks not being allowed it was to encourage division between the prisoners.

But they refused to bow to what the guards wanted. The more educated prisoners taught the illiterate prisoners how to read, how to do math. Some people say the huge mistake in Robben Island was that at first there weren’t only political prisoners there and the political prisoners educated and radicalized the regular types of prisoners.

In the late ’70s, the group cells got bunk beds. But before that, the bed for each prisoner (about 60 of them in a room the size of a small classroom) was a small rectangle of carpet kept rolled up during the day and then unrolled at night.

We were running out of time by the time we got to the wing where Mandela had stayed. He loved to garden, and spent as much time as he was able in the garden. The garden was also where he and the other ANC leaders in the wing stashed contraband and passed notes. One copy of Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom was confiscated, but he had another buried in the garden. There was another prisoner leaving from his wing, and so they smuggled the manuscript and a pair of the guys shoes to another prisoner experienced in shoe repair who then inserted the manuscript into the sole of the shoe. At least, that’s what we were told. I’m not sure how they managed to fit a whole manuscript in just one pair of shoes.

wensurprised

. She’s a beautiful writer and her experiences here in Malawi (in the education sector teaching at a secondary school, and in the village) are very different than mine. Plus, I’m pretty sure her username is a Terry Pratchett reference, and what more can you ask than that?

My mama brought me a copy of the July/August Mother Jones. In it is part of the photos taken by my new favorite photographer, Lana Šlezi?. This picture, and many others evoke something almost indescribable in me–their power is palpable and the subjects are both heartbreaking and heartbroken. She has photographed other subjects as well, all of which amaze me. As soon as her book comes out this fall, and I can get a hold of it, I am going to buy it.

Volcan Irazu – Crater 5, originally uploaded by firesika.

I’ve finally finished uploading, sorting, and adding stories to my Costa Rican photos, and they are now available in my Costa Rica 2007 collection on flickr. If you want to read the stories, they are available through the detail view of each set.

I should soon have the first photos from my trip to eastern Washington up and storied (I’ve got a great one about my grandpa). Well, they might not be up ’til after con, but I hope to have them up before Nomi and I go to Ashland on Wednesday, ’cause it’ll be hard enough keeping up once I start the road trip proper.

Self-portrait, originally uploaded by firesika.

I have new photos up on flickr. It isn´t even close to all of them, and I don´t have stories up yet, but if you want a preview, go looky. I´ll be adding some slowly, and then a few days after I get home, everything should be up in some form or another.

I’ve been meaning to do a more substantive post for a week and a half, but you ain’t getting one today.