2/9/2009: The Art of the Tortilla

I don't know how many of y'all know this, but making tortillas is an art form. April tried, now for the second time, to make tortillas tonight. She was successful in that they taste like tortillas; however, the consistency leaves something to be desired - they are quite stiff and break when we try to bend them. Still not bad considering an 80-year-old Mexican grandmother never taught her and she is learning from trial by error!

The Mexican rice she made was pretty good, as were the beans, although they were more like charro beans than refried. I still can't get over the whole "Mexican food in South Africa" thing, but here we are.

South Africans seem to have a wide range of tastes in their food - from Boerwoers (traditional sausage - think course-ground bratwurst) and pap (think grits minus any liquid whatsoever), to American-style hamburgers (most of Wimpy's burgers consist of double-meat, mayo, cheese, and whatever else fatty they could find) and, yes, Mexican food, which resides in its own specialty section in grocery stores. Granted, it is all Old El Paso brand (which I hear is made in New Jersey - get a rope!), but it still tastes like Mexican food. That reminds me, I need to take some pictures of the offerings at grocery stores...

My favourite thing, however, has to be that the cheeses here are inexpensive and varied. A huge tub of Feta is 2-3 bucks, blocks of blue cheese (Bavarian, Dutch, Belgian, and other varieties) are the same. It is truly a cheese-lover's paradise!

2/8/2009: Easy, like Sunday Morning

We went to mass again at Maria Regina in Lyttelton Manor this morning. The priest is leaving at the end of Feb, which kind of puts a wrench in my plan of getting spiritual advisement from him. Hopefully the new guy will be open to that. Anyway, I digress. Here are the kids in the courtyard of the parish:



Sundays here are pretty laid back. Since we don't have any family in the area (or for 10k miles in fact), we spend time with our own little family. Today after mass I took everyone to Wimpy's, a burger joint that is ubiquitous throughout the area. There are actually two located in the Centurion Mall, the mall we drove to in order to purchase a rolling pin and a couple of skirts for April. Here are pics of the kids at Wimpy's:

2/7/2009: Mission Work - The Beginning

This evening I was picked up at the house by Gordon and Francis - the latter is a full-time missionary; the former, a colleague at Vodacom. They do mission work on a regular basis in townships (slums), informal settlements (really bad slums), and outreach centres that cater to, for example, refugee Zimbabweans.

I am very interested in being involved with this mission work - I find it unfortunately humorous that American Catholics will help elect a president, the most pro-abortion president in history (not to mention pro-gay marriage and God knows what else he's in favor of that is contrary to Catholic teaching), using the justification that he cares for the poor more than conservatives do. We in America are brainwashed into thinking that poverty on an extreme level actually exists in our incredibly rich country. I was raised with parents whose income was under the poverty level; we never owned a house, we received governmental commodities in order to feed our family. That my friends is not poverty. South Africa is the wealthiest nation in sub-Saharan Africa, and this is just a glimpse of what people live like not 30 km from the mansion in which we live:

This is a clearing in Mamelodi, a township east of Pretoria where we set up equipment to show the Jesus film in Northern Sotho (a.k.a. Pedi), one of the 11 national language of South Africa. The fellow with the blue shirt and black pants is Pastor Ezekiel, the pastor of one of the churches in the area. He doesn't live in the "organized" township; rather, he lives in a shack in an informal settlement nearby.



Two team members walking to the clearing. The trash piles on the left are some of the few thousand trash piles laying around. In the evening, the piles are set on fire, emitting noxious fumes, as there are no governmental services which service townships. The man in the middle is Sylvester, the youth minister for another church, whose grounds lay to the right behind the fence. The pastor of the African (something) Church is named Pastor Mondi. Sylvester can dance, boy howdy!



Here is the screen set up in anticipation of dusk, at which point the film will start. People are beginning to gather (a total of about 40 will stay through the film, 18 of which give their details as being interested in learning more, 5 of which ask for prayer afterwards). The VW bug on the left belongs to Billy, another pastor who hails from Zambia and also lives in a shack in the informal settlement nearby.



"Z" and a team member setting things up, trash piles in background (a Shebeen [tavern] which plays music very loudly is out of the picture on the right.



Children gather to watch the film. There's a reason why Jesus said "let the children come to me". The innocence and happiness on these children's faces reminds us that God loves all of us, not just those of us who can afford to build $20 million dollar churches to remind ourselves how holy we are and how much, dagnabit, we care for the poor. Well, "care" in the sense that we pay taxes and let politicians do the caring for us.

2/7/2009: Saturday Morning Rituals

When I was growing up, our Saturday morning ritual was to get up early to the smell of pancakes cooking in the kitchen and the sound of Saturday morning cartoons. Since cartoons are too freaky for even me to watch anymore, we've eliminated that part of the morning, but I still like to cook pancakes for my kids. I have to give a shout-out to my mom for having me purchase a skillet at Makro - it sure makes pancake cooking easier!



This morning I made pancake pancakes, not pancake flapjacks. The difference here is that "pancakes" are made using water rather than milk, which makes them more like crepes. Whereas a flapjack absorbs syrup, a pancake just kind of lays there with syrup floating on top of it. They both are delish in my opinion, and in my children's (How can you go wrong with non-high-fructose-corn-syrup-syrup?).



As a side note, ground coffee is an anomaly here in SA. Everything is instant, which threw me for a loop. I'm used to at least crappy, weak, burnt-tasting American ground coffee. I have to say though, this instant stuff is still better. I was just expecting it to be more European down here in this regard I suppose.

2/6/2009: Ala Turka

We decided that an evening out was in order, as we've been really good all week. We stuck to April's meal plan and haven't eaten out at all, instead cooking and eating at home. We knew of a place called Ala Turka in the Irene Village Mall, about 2km from our house, so we decided to try it. In addition, they have belly-dancing classes and belly-dance entertainment on Friday nights. The food was excellent but pricey, and the children hadn't had naps, so they were cranky. I didn't get a picture of the large skewers of kabobs, but I did get a picture of our dessert - Turkish delight and baklava:



Here is the resultant damage:

2/5/2009: Adam's work

I went up to the office yesterday to meet with the guys with whom I work and organize some logistics for the demo we are doing on Friday for the head of the group over at Vodacom. Shortly after arriving, C. asks me "what have you done?". C. is the head of the group mind you, and has a lot of influence on whether or not my business gets to continue receiving contracts from Vodacom.

I asked him what the problem was and, to make a long story short, it centered around my being an idiot and not changing an rc.local file on one of our boxes, which had rebooted and loaded an old version, a non-working version, of our software. Oops.

I got some information from him and put it into our system and gave the location of where we thought some bad guys were (our software locates bad guys, but I won't go into specifics). These particular bad guys, 12 of them in all, armed with AK-47s, had just robbed a mall. He SMSed it over to the head of the bad-guy-finding group and that was that.

Well this morning I receive an SMS from C. Here is what it read:
Adam Thanx for your help yesterday. (name withheld) arrested 2 suspects about 300m from where we provided them with the location.

Awesome! Pats on the back all around!

Also this morning I got to do some more neat errands. By "neat", I mean "a huge pain and everything takes longer than it should". I set out to go get satellite TV switched on at the house (even with a powered antenna, the TV received one station, badly, and April wants to watch some Afrikaans programs).

Thinking that the DStv.com site should actually provide me with the location of a retailer, I foolishly copied down the address. Ha ha! The joke was on me. Seems the retailer had relocated and, after calling several disconnected numbers, I finally reached someone who could tell me where to go and what to do. Turns out the office was right by the mall where I needed to go to the bank and the post office. Score, although I was still irritated by driving all over Centurion!

The satellite TV here in South Africa is CHEAP with a capital C. I mean like two bucks a month cheap, and the decoder is all of 45 bucks. I went ahead and got a package that assured us we'd get Afrikaans channels.

Of course, what you're not told is that if you purchase a TV, you must have a license. This are to be purchased, with cash only I found out, at a SA Post Office. After getting the decoder and my account all set up for satellite, I walked over to the Centurion Mall and went to the bank to get my check card and the Post Office to pay R225 for a license and R5 to send one piece of mail to the U.S., April's resignation letter to LISD. LISD administration requires an original signed document stating that one has resigned. I would think that one not showing up would be proof enough, but hey, that's why they...are...educating...our...children. Crap. Looks like it's private school still! Those folks over there are getting paid way too many of our tax dollars to be that ignant.

2/3/2009: The Return of Philemon and Mexican Food!

Philemon showed up this afternoon. He had been at a social worker's office on Monday and today to sort out some issues with the separation and impending divorce from his wife. They have a small child, so he was pretty broken up it seemed. I told him we were just worried that something had happened to him since it can be dangerous out here in SA; I think he appreciated not being in trouble. There are still some language barriers, but it's my fault, as I'm the immigrant here. Heck, the dude knows English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and probably some other languages too (there are one or two more related to Zulu from what I've heard).

For dinner April decided that it was time to try her hand at making Mexican food. She used these ingredients:



King Korn is "Celebrating Being African". It's a VERY dense corn meal of some sort. It makes "Jim-style" tortillas, she found out. Or, in the words of Karen H., "pooperator" tortillas. Here is the resultant meal:



What you see there is Spanish rice (rice with tomato paste, we will work on some spices for that), a bowel-cleansing tortilla (not bad for her first tortilla-making effort EVER, however), and refried beans. The beans were good. A little TOO good, and we paid for it last night (and this morning). What y'all don't see here is the guacamole I made nor the tomato/pepper/onion relish/sorta-Pico-de-gallo-stuff. All in all a nice meal!