Botanical Gardens, Rocas, and Beaches

Jared and I are totally enjoying our last few months here. The weather has cooled down this month about 5 degrees, but the humidity is down about 30%, so it feels so much better now! When we first got here, I about went crazy with the heat alone! I was dripping with sweat all day and night. The night here is only about 2 degrees cooler than the daytime, so when it was the hot season, it was nasty 24 hours a day. There was no escape from the heat! But like I said, now its much nicer. There is always a breeze now, too. Gravanna is the name of the season in West Africa that we are in right now. It is technically the dry season, so there is no rain, but we get the big, heavy winds from North Africa so it is really pleasant. In other parts of West Africa, Gravanna is terrible because there is no rain, its hot, and the winds are dangerous because of wild fires. But ST is a luscious rain forest, so even without rain, the jungle has precipitation and there is still food grown.

We rented a car last weekend and drove around the island a bit. There are still Rocas here that you can visit. They are the old colonial plantations. Most of them are really remote and run down, but a few of them are still operating and produce coffee or cocoa. They are really interesting to visit though, because they are little communities all their own. Most of the families that live on the rocas have been there since the plantation was built and have never been off the land! Can you imagine generations and generations living in one small area and that is it?! Each roca has a school and a hospital, if you can actually call them that. There are old run down colonial buildings that would be considered dilapidated in the US, but people are living in them here. Most everyone speaks Portuguese or some form of it, but a lot of the rocas speak a mixture of Portuguese and Forro (a local language) or a language all their own. It is so strange seeing these places. Its like walking into another world!

We also went to the Botanical Garden here which was awesome! There were samples of all kinds of tropical flowers that I have never seen before! Huge, waxy flowers that ca handle all kinds of weather and heat! There were also a lot of fruit trees, like pink and green guava, jack fruit, bread fruit, banana, papaya, and mango.

We went to a beach too, that is about 45 minutes away from the city. It is the only beach on the island that has sand dollars on it, but they are not like sand dollars you find in the US. Instead of being a circle, they look more like an octopus. The top is circular, but the bottom is cut out so that it looks like legs. They are totally weird. I think we picked up 4 or so of them. Hopefully they do not break on our way home!

Jack Fruit

There are a lot of fruits that grow in São Tome on a regular basis that I rarely have in the US. You can find these topical fruits, but you have to go to Whole Foods and pay a ton of money for them. Fruits like Passion Fruit, Papaya, Star Fruit, and Safu are available on every street corner and at every stand in the Market for, what amounts to, $0.30 in USD. Pineapples, 4 or 5 different types of bananas, plantains, oranges that are not orange but green, avocados, and mangos, are also everywhere. Breadfruit is also here and usually you do not have to buy it because most streets are lined with huge, beautiful, 2 toned green leaved, breadfruit trees that anyone can pull and eat off of.

Jack Fruit, however, is a fruit that I have never seen before or even heard of before. It is the ugliest fruit I have ever seen! It grows off of the trunk of trees, like a tumor, and is greenish-yellow, bumpy and sappy! A Jack Fruit is about the size of a bowling ball, but it is not round. They are oblong and bumpy with bulges at times.

To cut open a Jack Fruit, you must first dip your knife in oil so that it does not get sticky with the sap of the fruit. The women who sell it prepared (and people who prepare it in their homes) cover their hands in oil as well to prevent them from getting sappy. Once the fruit is cut in half, the first priority is to section off the fruit and cut out the white center. Jack Fruit has tons of pods in it with a seed inside each. Between each pod are fibers that need to be pulled away. (The pod is the edible part of the fruit.) Once the center is cut away, you can bend the section out so that the pods pull away from one another and the fibers break off. Then comes the tedious task of pulling out the pods, stripping away the fibers and trying desperately to create a bowl full of pods for everyone to enjoy, instead of eating the pod as soon as it is cleaned!

Jack Fruit is sticky, sweet, and so so yummy! It has the sweetness similar to a pineapple, but not the same taste. The texture is unlike any fruit I have ever had, and it seems odd to call it a fruit because it is so dense and fiber-y.

The Jack Fruit season just started and we are starting to see it in the baskets of the street vendors. So far, it runs $50,000 dobras (2 Euros) for a bag of prepared pods, which is pretty big and holds a lot of pods, and $30,000 dobras for half a fruit, unprepared.

Click here for pictures of Jack Fruit.

The Paradoxes of Africa

I never ceased to be amazed by the paradoxes of this fascinating place. As you may know the World Cup is starting today (and I am totally stoked to be seeing it in Africa!!). I've started asking around to see who most Santomeans are supporting in the tournament. When you ask who they are cheering for in the Cup they say, "Portugal!!" When asked about what they think of Portuguese people they say, "They are bad. They put us in slavery and killed us."

STRIKE!

On Friday morning, Jared and I woke up without any power. Now this was not a big deal, as most mornings our power does not turn on until 8:00 or so. What was odd though, was that our water pressure was gone. I usually clean and do a few loads of laundry on Fridays, and luckily I finished cleaning before the water ran out, but by 10:00, the power was not on and I had not been able to do laundry yet. The power outages are not scheduled and it’s not like we can depend on power, but this was the first Friday morning that I had not been able to do laundry. With that and the water issue, I figured something was up, but Jared and I went about our usual chores of walking into the city for some groceries and stopping for to make a withdraw from the bank. As we turned the corner to the bank, Kristi called me and asked if we had heard the news. (Which, no, we had not.) The local electric and water company was on strike indefinitely. The workers were demanding a 60% salary increase and would not turn on the water supply or the power until their demands were met!

Clearly, I freaked out. How would we shower? How would we flush our toilet? How would we clean our clothes? Now, in Ghana, we had very bad water pressure and our upstairs apartment did not have running water most of the time. We had to manually fill the toilet to flush it, we had to bathe out of buckets, and we had to hand wash our clothes. The only difference between Ghana and here though, was that we got our buckets filled downstairs. If the water was out all over the island, then were would we go? To the river, I guess, right?! Its not completely undo-able, but I was a bit nervous about how our daily life would change if the strike lasted long. After our stop at the bank, we went to the store and bought candles, 2 cases of 12, 1.5 liter bottles of water and 2, 3 packs of 5 liter jugs. We took a taxi home (b/c let’s be honest, we can’t carry that amount of water for a 20 minute walk) and unloaded it all into the apartment. While we did this, the ladies in the apartment below us were filling up buckets, bowls, bins, pots and anything else that can hold water, out of a faucet in the wall. I immediately went up to them and asked how they had water and we did not, and I asked if the rumor of the strike was true. They told us that yes, the strike was on and it would last for 5 days, that the water coming out was the end of the city’s well, and of course we could have some too. So, Jared and I filled 4 big bowls, 2 pressure cookers, 1 cooler, and 2 pots full and set them all over the house. This water was the same as the water we usually have, which means its fine for washing dishes, clothes, and our bodies, but not fine for cooking or drinking, so all the bottled water was still useful. However, there was the issue of filling the toilet. Clearly we decided to use the “If its yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” method, but in order to flush Portuguese style toilets, you need a lot of water. I mean, like a whole bucket full. I personally thought the water from the tap was too precious for this, so we went across the street to the park and filled 2 buckets with the nasty, mossy, dirty pond water, hauled it home, but lids on the buckets, and told ourselves that the pond water was for the toilet ONLY!

By this time, I felt much better about our situation and was pretty sure we could wade through 5 days of no power and water. Of course, there was the annoying and worrisome thought at the back of my mind saying, “what if the strike goes longer than 5 days?” But I chose to ignore it. Jared and I went about the rest of our day fairly normally at this point. I went to the hotel to charge the computer battery because the hotel has a generator system, their Internet was working so I checked my email, and then that night, we were having our friend, Polly, over for dinner. In the evening, Jared and I read on our veranda in the last of the sunlight that day and at about 5:30 I got up to go start dinner in the kitchen. When I walked into the living room, I noticed the clock on the DVD player – it was lit up. “Um, Jared,” I said, “we have power.” And within an hour, the water was running again too. Polly came over and was as astonished as we were at our good luck, because nowhere else had power on her drive to our house and Kristi did not either at the ADRA compound. We turned on the TV, watched the news and heard that the strike had been suspended for 2 days and that the government had to come up with a contract in that time, or the strike would resume Monday morning.

We decided to keep the all the water (except the pond water – we replaced it with tap water) in the house for the weekend incase the strike resumed, but I was really excited and hopeful that it would not happen again. On Sunday, we heard through a friend of a friend (so maybe not too reliable) that the strike had been resolved and raises had been agreed upon, but it was not mentioned on the news so we were unsure. Also, we heard from another friend, that the strike was postponed for 12 days and that the government is to use this time to come up with a new contract. So, who knows what to believe.

Well, its Monday morning now, the power and water are still on, and we still have water sitting all over the house in buckets and pots just waiting for the official word that the strike is indeed over. I’ll keep you posted…