Our belongings were cursorily loaded into several well-used wheelbarrows as we were invited to walk the fifty yards to our new home. After we had been shown to our mud block house with concrete floors and only screens in the windows, I succumbed to the despair of realizing how far away I was from my mother and that I was stuck in the African jungle ministering to people that enjoyed calling me fat! Jeff had forgotten to warn me about that unusual “perspective“ on body size.
To an African, if you had any meat (and fat) on your bones, you must surely be blessed by God. For you see, that would mean you had the means to buy and eat all the food you wanted. Once I heard the explanation, I felt humbled and somewhat thankful. It still stung my pride a little about the “fat” part, but I tried to submit to the cultural contradictions that were certain to happen frequently.
As much as I loved our house, the layout of the rooms, and the simple quaintness of it, my mind was still on overload with the reality of how far away we were from America. I started fantasizing about how I could get in the one engine plane, return to Monrovia, hop a larger plane headed to Europe, take another plane to NYC, and from there board a plane that would take me to Charlotte. A plane where it would be climate-controlled, where they would speak English in an accent that I could understand, and where they would serve peanuts and Cokes. However, that conjecture did nothing but make the helplessness and despair mount up in my soul even more! I was a panic attack in the making if I didn’t stop.
For weeks, I battled the fantasy of leaving that intriguing, but strange place and never coming back. Though I did not write down the verses God used to assure me that I was in the right place, He reminded me of how I was created...to be an adventurer for this very time! God tenderly revealed to my hurting heart that He knew my frame and exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I was reminded of that repeatedly as I learned the idiosyncrasies of living on a mission compound in the African jungle and little by little acknowledged that He would be sufficient for me and that He would use me in spite of myself.
Pampered American
A couple of days after getting used to our house, I wrote in my journal:
After we started unpacking our container, we realized how much we had as Americans in comparison to the Liberians. Some items that we brought out now seemed silly and frivolous, but yet, there they were, a reflection of the person I had been just a few weeks before. It was an ethereal feeling but yet freeing to think that we could really live without so many things. The American mindset can so often trap us into thinking that we simply cannot do without our things.
Jeff paid some of the Bible school students to help unload our belongings into the house, and I remember feeling a little shiny and pampered. The men were so kind and never made any comments around us about what they were unloading, but their silence did make me wonder what they went back and told their wives about the American missionaries and their things. I have learned over the years of living in West Africa that most Africans expect that we would live differently than them, so perhaps they were not thinking anything negative at all.
Another notion to be accepted was that we were fundamentally, in most every way, somewhat distanced from them because of who we were and where we came from. There was no way that we could understand them on their basic cultural level. The most comforting thing was that we had come to share Christ and when that was accepted, the bond we had in our Savior would cross over many of those physical and cultural barriers. All of that took time. One basic truth that spanned the years that we spent ministering to and with Africans is that even in that tight Christian bond, there was also a fragile liberty of mutual acceptance of each other’s culture and perspective. That acknowledged, anything was possible.
Food, Food, Food of the Jungle
So many Liberians came to our house the first week to welcome us, it almost seemed overwhelming! Many of them remembered Jeff from the year before when he had come out on a survey trip, but it seemed that all the people we met were thrilled that we were there. I was personally thankful that there was no more discussion about my fatness. It was heartwarming to see how much they cared that we had come to live among them. One of the most endearing things about an African is that they never visited without bringing something meaningful. Our pantry floor was quickly scattered with bowls and bags of exceptional West African country rice, fresh vegetables and fruits, and some cooked dishes that took a little courage to sniff and taste. It meant so much because they, who had so little, wanted to share with us.
This is a good place to describe some of the rice dishes that the Liberians cherished as their “bread of life”. They call their dishes “rice and soup” even though the soup is much more like a thick stew that is put on top of the rice. Liberian soup is prepared by first cooking meat and onion in a good amount of oil (mostly palm oil) until very tender. They would then add whatever vegetable they had on hand: eggplant, okra, bitterball (a small round eggplant-like food that was indeed very bitter tasting), potato greens (much like the tops of a sweet potato here in the States), cassava greens (which was much like collard greens in texture but had a much more pungent flavor). Cassava green soup or potato green soup became one of my family’s favorites; however, after all the years of living in West Africa, I just could not acquire a taste for either of those green soups though I did eat them when they were offered.
African cooks would add the vegetable of choice and then some bouillon cubes usually as the only seasoning, unless they were a Liberian tribe that cooked all their soups with hot peppers. After simmering the soup for a while, they would serve this flavorful concoction over their delectable country rice. My two particular favorites were peanut soup (chicken and ground peanuts in a tomato-based broth) and okra soup. When available, which wasn’t very often, we would also enjoy green bean or collard green soup.
One of their poor man’s meals when they didn’t have rice would be something that the Gio people in our area called “dumboy.” They would prepare the cassava root into a starchy eatable dish that was served with any kind of very slippery type soup such as okra. They would boil the cassava, pound it in a mortar until it became sticky and then would be shaped into a ball. Pinching off small amounts of the dumboy, they would roll it into a ball and then dip it into the “slippery” soup. Because the dumboy was of a chewy substance, the key would be to dip the ball into the soup and then swallow the ball without chewing. I, for one, enjoyed chewing my food too much, so I never really got into making an entire meal of that dish. It was a true favorite of most missionary kids there in Liberia.
Palm butter soup is perhaps the icon of Liberian food, though it is the hardest to describe. It deserves its own paragraph and its own place in the annals of unique and exotically delicious international dishes. Indigenous to the West African region (as far as I know), palm butter is a taste that rivals any of the foods I have ever experienced. There’s nothing, however, in our American fare that compares to it, and we’ve been told that describing how it tastes is no where near like actually taking a bite of its fibrous golden texture. In a nutshell, palm butter soup is made entirely from the red, ripe palm nuts. They are boiled until the hard, outer shell and the fibrous covering disintegrate. Using a strainer, they remove everything except the butter. Boiling the butter until thickened–much like broccoli cheese soup–they then added chicken and onion. Though it is one of the most popular meals among the Liberians, the cooking process was also very tedious.
Little Help From My Friends
Friends are special, holding important places in our lives no matter who they are, where we meet them, and how often we see them. I had learned back in high school that friends did not have to be the same color as me or even have the same cultural background to bring depth and joy to my life. It was no different in Liberia. From the very beginning of our Liberian ministry, Mary Kwiah was such a friend.
From the beginning, there was a special