What They Eat

Posted on May 19, 2012 by admin

For half of the ride between Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, and Rundu, Sydney and I got a hitchhike in the back of a pick-up truck with a Namibian who had been studying in South Africa. I told them that I had been traveling in France, and he said, “I went to France once, but I didn’t like it much. Mostly because the food wasn’t any good.”

I guess it all comes down to personal and cultural preference. In my opinion, Namibian village food is not that exciting. But since this is supposedly a food blog, I’ll tell you about it. The staple food is paap – a stiff porridge made out of either maize meal or millet meal. In Mavanze, we usually had maize meal porridge, which is basically grits without the butter. It was usually served with goat, chicken, or fish, and a sauce made from a dried soup packet.

There is, however, one Namibian food ritual worth mentioning: the braii. It’s the Namibian version of a barbecue. Grill tons of meat, drink beer, invite all your friends. My first evening in Rundu, Sydney, her friend Matt and I made friends with some fifty-year-old women at a bar. They invited us to their house for a braii the next day.

We stayed for hours, and Sydney and Matt declared it the best braii they had been to yet. Pretty good for my third day in. I think the whole night was indicative of my experience with Namibians – I was amazed by how friendly and welcoming they were, especially to a bunch of weirdos like us.

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Town Time vs. Village Time

Posted on May 15, 2012 by admin

I know farmers are supposed to hate daylight savings time, but I’m a huge fan. Spring forward means the day feels longer, fall back means I no longer have to wake up in the dark.

Since it’s winter in Namibia, they fell back to winter time just a few weeks before I arrived. However, in Mavanze, nobody has a clock. Kids know when to go to school by looking at the sun. So the teachers couldn’t just tell them to change their clocks and come an hour later – it would have been a mess. Instead, they stayed on summer time until the end of the term, and they’ll switch to winter time at the beginning of next term, which is at the end of May.

So while we were in the village, we had our clocks set to summer time. But that meant that every time we took a fifteen-minute car ride into Rundu, we got to fall back an hour! Sometimes, I would wake up, take a shower, clean, talk to people in the village, head into town, and then realize it was only 8:30 AM. Yes, we had to spring forward when we got back to the village, but that was fine – since it’s winter, it gets dark really early, and when it’s dark, there’s not much to do in the village besides go to bed.

When we went back to Windhoek a few days before my flight left, we arrived at the hostel around 7:30 PM, town time. We were exhausted. But who goes to bed at 7:30? Luckily, we had a solution: spring forward to village time for the night. 8:30 is a totally reasonable bedtime in the village. And, the next day was my birthday, so if I got to fall back in the morning, my birthday would be extra long!

It’s fun to be the only person within miles who uses a clock.

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Village Life

Posted on May 11, 2012 by admin

Fun Fact: Namibia is the second least densely populated country in the world. After Mongolia.

My friend Sydney has been living there since August. We’ve been friends for nine years. Her family lives three blocks away from mine. I did not want to go two and a half years without seeing her, and  I may never get another chance to stay in a Namibian village again. Besides, since I was already in Europe, I was basically halfway there!

Sydney’s a Peace Corps Volunteer, and she works at a center for orphans and vulnerable children in the village of Mavanze, about twenty minutes by car from Rundu. She also recently started teaching English and math part time at the local school. Her blog is awesome and she has some amazing stories about daily life in the village.

We spent about half of the time I was there in Mavanze. Sydney lives at the center, where she works. She lives with a host family, who also work for the center.

The kids were in exams and then on their term break while I was there, so there wasn’t too much work to do. I did grade some English and math tests. No, I haven’t taken math since high school. We also spent a lot of time sitting under the tree and hanging out with any kids who came by.

The center also has a farm. They grow maize and vegetables and raise chickens and goats! They’re meat goats, so I didn’t get to make any cheese. But I did talk with Sydney’s best village friend Kankala about all the different ways of raising goats. He wants to move across the river to Angola, because there’s enough space there to raise them free-range. I told him that he needs to wait until I’m starting my goat farm to visit Sydney in the US.

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The Schengen Agreement

Posted on May 7, 2012 by admin

The Schengen Zone

The Schengen Zone is a group of countries that includes most of continental Europe, even Switzerland and most Eastern European countries. These countries no longer control borders within the Schengen Zone. You don’t need a passport to cross between them, and citizens of one Schengen country can live in any of the others.

#FirstWorldProblem

However, because there are no borders, residents of non-Schengen countries, such as myself, only get one entrance stamp on their passport for the entire area – and that entrance stamp is only good for three months at a time. And unlike in some countries, you can’t just leave for an hour and come back – you have to leave for three months.  Unless you have a visa, you can only spend 90 days out of every 180 days in the Schengen Zone. So after three months in Spain and France, I had to leave the Schengen Zone for three months before they would let me back in.

Visa Options

Many Schengen countries offer long-term tourist visas that let you stay in that country (and visit any other Schengen country) for up to a year. I looked into getting one for France, but by the time I figured it out I didn’t have enough time. The requirements are pretty strict and they may be hard to get, but if you’re planning a long trip through Europe, it would definitely be worth a try!

Overstaying

Throughout my travels, I’ve met plenty of people who have overstayed their three months. They’ll be pretty safe until they try to leave the Schengen Zone. Then, they may get caught, and they may not. If they do get caught, the worst that will happen is probably this: they’ll be fined, dealing with immigration will take so long that they’ll miss their flights and have to buy new tickets home, and they may have trouble getting visas in the future.

I considered overstaying my european welcome. The internet is rife with advice as to how to avoid getting caught (go to Amsterdam! No, not anymore, now you have to go to Copenhagen!) but none of it seemed sure enough to me. I may want a visa in the future. And I really don’t think my parents would appreciate a phone call saying that I spent all my money on a trip around Europe and now need them to buy me a new plane ticket home because I’m being deported.

#FirstWorldSolution

So I said goodbye to Shelly in Barcelona and hopped on a budget flight to London. I’m going to spend three weeks in Namibia visiting my friend Sydney, who is a Peace Corps volunteer there. Then I’ll wait out my three months of exile in the UK and Ireland, neither of which are a part of the Schengen Agreement. No, this wasn’t part of the original plan. But somehow, I think I’ll survive.

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Old Friends, New Places

Posted on May 4, 2012 by admin

Rob and I said goodbye after we took the ferry back to the mainland from Corsica. He’s heading back to the states to get a job, make some money, start acting like a real adult etc. Good luck Rob, I miss you! And don’t worry, I’ll send you copies of all the recipes I learn.

My journey post-Corsica took me back to Spain, where everything is cheap but my communication skills are much more rudimentary. I went to Zaragoza to visit my good friend Shelly, now known to her Spanish friends as Mica, who has been teaching English there since October.

Of course it was awesome to see her again, and she was the perfect tour guide. Foreign cities are so much more fun with a good friend who knows her way around. I met Shelly’s Spanish friends and got her take on the Zaragoza life. I also learned a lot of great words.

Callejear – my favorite city pastime. Wandering through the small streets (los calles) to get from one place to another.

Dormiloña – not sure of the spelling on this one. Somebody who sleeps a lot. Feminine. No, they weren’t talking about me!

Cursi – romantic in a cheesy, embarrassing kind of way.

Since I was there during Semana Santa, the week before Easter, I got to see a traditional Easter parade, with participants wearing traditional Easter outfits.

 

What?

My time in Zaragoza felt like a vacation from my vacation. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, and I cooked it myself in Shelly’s spotless and well-appointed kitchen. I slept in a bed, as long as I wanted. I took a lot of showers.

Then we went to Barcelona together. Shelly had been commenting that Zaragoza seemed really empty, because Semana Santa is everybody’s spring break. Where did they all go? To Barcelona, of course!

But I can deal with crowds of tourists, and we had an awesome time getting our callejear on in this foreign land. My favorite spot, no question, was Parque Guel, a sculpture park designed by Gaudi.

 

Other highlights: avellanas – very cheap packets of delicious roasted hazelnuts sold everywhere. Mantecados – traditional spanish cookies made with lard. And oh yeah. Roquefort and walnut flavored ice cream.

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Most Exciting Cheese Yet?

Posted on April 29, 2012 by admin

Because of the drought, the goats don’t have much milk right now. They have enough for their kids, and a little more. So cheese production won’t really be starting until after Easter, when Romuald slaughters most of the kids. But we did get to help with a couple small test batches.

The cheese they make is lactic, as opposed to enzymatic. Lactic cheese sets over a longer period of time and becomes acidic as it sets, and this farm sets their cheese over a 48 hour period – absolutely the longest caillage I’ve heard of. Most lactic cheeses are set at 70-78 degrees. Here, they achieve that temperature range without heating or refrigerating the milk and without using a thermometer. They leave the evening milk outside, where it is cool but not always cold, for the night. Then in the morning, they mix it it with the fresh, warm morning milk.

Of course, it’s not always exactly the same temperature, so they have to adjust thee amount of rennet they use accordingly. But they do it all by estimate and experience.

They don’t add any culture, commercial or otherwise, to the milk. They just let it sour on its own. Both of the cheesemakers we have met who work this way use milk that has never been cooled to make their cheese. This could be important. If you refrigerate the milk, its natural microflora might change accordingly. And then the dominant microorganisms will be those that thrive at much lower temperatures than you will be aging the cheese – not the ones you’re looking for. Nobody has ever told me that you can’t refrigerate milk and then make cheese without a culture, but it does make sense. Fascinating, isn’t it?

I asked Romuald if he ever saves the rennet from the kids he slaughters, and he said no. He said, of course, that’s the best way to do it, but since they’re already working without thermometers, temperature control, or commercial culture, natural rennet would just be one variable too many. I think finding someone who can teach me how to use natural rennet might be my most difficult challenge.

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Working by Hand

Posted on April 25, 2012 by admin

I don’t like working with machines. They are expensive to buy and to run, and especially when I’m involved, they break easily. So, I want to learn to work with goats with as few machines as possible. This is a good place to do it. Agathe and Romuald milk by hand and make cheese by hand, and there’s not a tractor or a pasteurizer in sight.

While most people assume that working without machines creates an impossible amount of work, I don’t think this has to be the case. You just have to design your farm, your schedule, your habits and your herd to make it work.

Romuald told me that when he’s selecting which doelings to keep for his herd, his first criterion is that she’s healthy. But the second thing he selects for, more important than milk quantity and quality, is easily hand-milkable teats. This is so important – when the milking machine broke at Coonridge and we had to hand-milk for a week, some of the goats took five times as long as the easiest ones. Their teats were tiny and extremely hard to work with, which made hand-milking seem like a harder chore than it has to be.

We also muck out the barn by hand. We do it between every day and every three days. It usually takes about 20 minutes or half an hour. It’s doable and not too backbreaking. But if that’s the way you’re going to do it, you have to keep up with it. If you go a whole season without mucking out the barn, you’re going to need a tractor.

Although I’ve been enjoying working by hand here, I have to report that Agathe and Romuald have not succeeded at fulfilling my ultimate dream: running a farm without owning a car. I don’t think the thought has ever crossed their mind. However, all they have is one big van: no trailer. This works because they feed their goats very little. They don’t have to truck in tons of hay to last for the winter. So selecting a site that has plenty of wild food makes this possible. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find (or afford) land this good in the U.S., but it’s something to hope for.

Of course the number one thing that makes working by hand possible is having a small herd. No, you don’t get as much milk, so you don’t earn as much money. But you don’t have to pay to buy and run all those machines. Sounds like a good trade-off to me.

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“There’s Nothing to Eat Here”

Posted on April 21, 2012 by admin

The farmers at this farm basically use the “no fences, no neighbors” system of grazing that we learned at Coonridge. They walk the goats out of the barn in the morning, the goats eat what they want and come back in the afternoon. Except, there actually are a few neighbors here, and there should probably be fences because the goats occasionally get into pastures where they’re not allowed.

One of the things that makes Corsica “the best place in the world” is that normally, there’s food all year. The winter isn’t cold enough to kill the vegetation, and the summer isn’t dry enough. Romuald and Agathe do supplement the goats’ diets with grain, which makes them produce milk, but except during the mise-bas season when the goats aren’t going out, they don’t have to feed any hay. And these girls are serious milkers – I’m sure that without any concentrates at all, though they wouldn’t produce quite as heavily, they would do just fine.

Since most of the herd has given birth, we just started letting them out to browse again. We are just leaving the few who haven’t given birth yet in the park with a little hay. Yesterday, I was surprised when the goats returned to the field behind the house early in the afternoon. They clearly hadn’t eaten as much as they could have, and there was plenty of time left during the day. “Yeah, it’s a problem,” Romuad said. “It’s been so dry this year, the plants haven’t been growing like they should, and there’s nothing to eat out there.”

Rob and I were shocked. We had been talking about how lush the forest was here, how much greenery their was, and how it must be impossible for free-range goats to overgraze land like this. But the evidence was there – the goats were not impressed by the offerings of their forest.

I’ve learned and read in different ways that, when your job is raising plants and animals, the enemy is not rain or lack of rain, hot or cold, but inconsistency. In the high desert of New Mexico, it’s normal for months to go by without rain. The ecosystem is based on a pattern of periodic drought, and it functions well like that, even when there are goats grazing there all year round. Here, everything depends on a lot of rain.

But my question remains. Though there is less food in the forest than usual, there is more than there is in other places where goats also thrive. So why don’t the goats eat it? Is it that they aren’t used to traveling far and fast enough to fill up when the forest is not as lush? Or do they somehow know what the forest should look like and know that if they want to eat later, they better not overgraze now? If that’s the case, though it’s unfortunate that the goats don’t have as much milk at this time of year as they normally do, that’s pretty cool.

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Teats, Bottles, Buckets, Syringes

Posted on April 17, 2012 by admin

Since we arrived during kidding season, we get to learn not just about the births themselves, but also about caring for kids. There is a demand here for kid meat, so Romuald and Agathe raise all of the kids at least for the first month of their lives. Then, they choose which females, and sometimes which males, to keep for the herd, and slaughter the rest for meat.

In the past, they raised their kids on the mothers. Although there are goatherds in the U.S. who will tell you that a kid raised this way will steal too much milk and never be properly weaned, it always seemed like the best option to me – it’s so much less work, and if you keep the kids apart from the mothers for at least part of the day, you can still get milk. They put the kids with the mothers twice a day, in the morning and the evening, and keep them separate all day and all night.

But here, it is a lot of work. A lot of the goats have teats that hang very low, and the kids can’t all drink from them themselves. We have to help them. Romuald says that this is a problem with the French Alpines, the main breed in his herd. So I expect that if you had goats who were bred to have smaller teats, you would not run into this problem.

Sometimes, kids refuse to nurse. Romuald says this is usually because some dirt or a piece of the birth envelope is blocking air passage in their nose, and they can’t breathe and drink at the same time. When this happens, we clean their noses with a squirt of sterile water and bottle feed them. If they won’t take the bottle either, we have to feed them with a syringe.

Since the kids have gotten used to us helping them nurse, when we hold a goat to help her kid, ten other kids usually run over to try to get in on the action. This gets the goat pretty mad and generally clogs up the operation.

Anyway, they decided that this year, for the kids who can’t drink on their own, they are going to try milking the goats out and then giving milk to the kids in buckets. Rob and I have been delegated this task, but so far it is not going well. Some of them have learned out to lap up the milk, but with the others, we end up giving them milk swirlies for ten minutes and then caving in and bottle feeding them. Apparently it’s much easier to teach them if you take them away from their mothers when they’re only a few days old. We’ll see how it goes.

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Mise-Bas

Posted on April 14, 2012 by admin

Literally: putting below. It’s the French word for an animal birth. We arrived at this beautiful farm in Corsica, chez Romuald and Agathe, right in the middle of kidding season.

In all my work with goats, I had never seen one give birth, so I was pretty excited. The first few days we were here, two or three goats gave birth every day. Romuad says that occasionally he has to help a goat with a birth, usually because the kid is not positioned right, but every one that we’ve seen has gone without a problem.

Romuald’s system for breeding his goats is simple: five months before he wants the kids to be born, he lets a few bucks in with the herd. So all the goats here kid within a few weeks of each other. Romuald says that if you feed them oats starting a month before you plan to breed them, it regulates the goats’ ovulation cycle and causes them to all come in heat at the same time. He says that other years, he has fed them oats, and they all kidded within ten days of each other. This year he didn’t, because he wanted to see the difference.

Normally, the goats here are free range. But right now, in order to keep the goats from having their kids in the wild, Romuald is keeping them in a large park. Each morning, Rob and I spread hay around on top of the trees in the park. Goats don’t like to eat hay off of the ground, because eating off the ground spreads parasites. Farms that feed hay for a large portion of the year usually have a feeder that they can eat out of. But for just a few weeks, I think I prefer this solution – it’s fun to watch the goats eat hay out of trees.

 

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