Food! Glorious Food!

I love eating. I love reveling in comfort food as well as trying new and unknown dishes. Eating in Kerala has been amazing. The food here is delicious, and now that I’ve adjusted to the cuisine, I think food is one of the biggest things I will miss about Kerala. So I dedicate this post to food, so that you will better understand what, when, and how I eat in Kerala.

First: We eat with our hands here. To be more specific, we eat with our right hand, neatly scooping fingerfuls of rice into our mouths, without making a mess of our plates or ourselves. This is surprisingly efficient and means fewer dishes to wash after meals.

Meal Times and Dishes:

Breakfast – Around 8am. This is the most interesting meal of the day in my opinion. Here are some common Kerala breakfasts:
• Dosai (pronounced doe-sha) with sambar and/or coconut chutney. Dosai is a soft somewhat sour bread (shaped like a tortilla) made from rice flour, which you dip into sambar, a spicy vegetable curry. (Curries are can range in consistency from soup to thick stew. Sambar is more soup-like.) Alternatively you can dip the dosai in chutney, which is usually a thicker consistency and made with coconut and red or green chilies. The dosai dough can also be shaped into palm-sized ovals, which are called Idli. Idli is also eaten with sambar and chutney for breakfast
• Appaam. Appaam is shaped just like dosai, but the dough is sweeter and contains coconut. It can be eaten with a variety of curries, such as kathala (chickpea) curry – this is one of my favorites! – chicken curry, and egg curry (hardboiled eggs served with an onion, garlic, chili combination).
• Ooppumav. This is another of my favorite dishes. It is basically a cream of wheat dish with onions, chilies, and black pepper. You can eat it with the same curries you eat with appaam, but I think it is best when you mash a banana into it with your fingers. This gives it better consistency and makes it sweeter!
•Pootu. This is basically steamed rice flour with coconut. It’s usually molded in the shape of a log, and then you can break of sections to mix with your breakfast curries. Again I think it’s particularly delicious when eaten with a mashed up banana. Did I mention that I’ve really come to like bananas since I started living in this tropical region that has more banana varieties than I can count?
•Sweet Bread with curry. This is classic Sunday morning fare in Kerala. It’s regular bread, just very sweet. Usually bread is eaten with potato curry or some other vegetable curry.

Lunch - Around noon. Lunch is always rice. Rice forms the center of almost every meal in Kerala. (All the breakfast foods mentioned above are made with rice flour.) So lunch is a heaping plate of rice, with several curries. We have sambar as the main lunch curry almost every day. Side dishes can include:
•Fish curry. Probably my favorite curry in Kerala. Fish pieces are cooked and served in a thin red sauce. It’s made with lots of red chilies and garlic, so it’s very spicy, which is what makes it so good. It is also one of the most prominent Kerala dishes.
•Thoren. This amazing dish can be made with almost any vegetable. The vegetable is cut into small pieces and sautéed with coconut and chilies. It’s fabulous, and as a dry dish it adds great texture to the meal.
•Papadam. Small, salty, chip-like bread. You crush it into your rice and curry mixture, but beware: only crush one bite at a time otherwise it will get soggy sitting in the rice.
•Pickle. This is nothing like what we in the West call a pickle. In Kerala, pickle is a very spicy fruit preparation. Limes, lemons, mangos, etc can all be cut into tiny pieces and pickled with lots of chilies, salt, and vinegar. This is jarred and stored for some time. Then a jar will be opened up, and we’ll be eating lemon pickle with lunch for weeks. When you mix pickle with your rice it will generally overpower any other curry taste on your plate. After getting used to the taste, I’ve discovered that his can actually be a good thing.


[Picture of a Kerala Feast for lunch. Yes, it really is served on a banana leaf. the rice is surrounded by many different curries, banana cips, papadam,pickle etc. My first lunch in Kerala looked like this because we arrived on the day of the biggest festival in the state, Onam. We had lunch at a Hindu temple, where they served this meal to us and to the several thousand other guests at the temple for the festival.]

Tea - 4pm. Tea, or “chaia,” in Kerala means tea with lots of milk and sugar. I think it tastes like sweet milk with a little bit of tea flavor. Although I still prefer black tea, I’ve come to appreciate chaia more and more. With tea we usually eat a snack of some kind. This snack can be biscuits (something very much like Nilla Wafers) or bakery items like sweet buns or samosas or wada (a doughnut shaped bread with onions and chilies). I think the most common snack is banana fry, that is, bananas halved and dipped in appaam batter, then fried. It’s tasty but very oily.

Dinner - Around 8pm. Dinner is often also rice and curry, like at lunch, but it can also have some variation. Here are some other dinner foods:
•Chapatti. These are basically wheat flour tortillas that you tear and eat with different curries.
•Porotta. This rich flat bread is cooked with more oil than a chapatti. It tears in round pieces, and this bread is especially great for soaking up extra curry sauces. However, porotta is more of a special occasion food, whereas chapatti can be an everyday bread.


Although it took me some time to grow accustomed to Kerala’s cuisine, I have now fully embraced the food here. I have already bought a cookbook and am determined to learn to cook at least a few of these dishes before I leave. Because, even though I’ll be happy to eat less rice next year, I’m not sure if I’ll survive the year if I can’t eat fish curry every now and then.

My Searing Bones Light the Way

“In African language we say ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ I would not know how to be a human being at all except that I learned this from other human beings.”

-Archbishop Desmond Tutu

I think I have been falling in love. And I didn’t even realize it fully. Sometime in the last six months I fell in love with the obnoxious way the fifth graders at Nicholson School would always ask me where I was going; the way they dug through my waste basket and left papers and wrappers scattered on the floor. I fell in love with listening to the teachers in the staff room talk to each other in Malayalam on hot afternoons: incomprehensible, yet comforting. Without knowing it I came to love the hanging lines of school uniforms drying in the sunlight and the broken step near the kitchen where I sometimes trip.

Last week, I had to say a lot of goodbyes. (A foretaste of the grief to come.) The school year in Kerala ends in March, and by last Friday all the students who are not taking government exams (i.e. everyone except grades 10-12) went home. And because classes are over now, most of the teachers who usually stay at the school also went home. Even though the older girls are still here studying for their exams, the school is much quieter, and I miss everyone. The dormitory where I live, which used to be full of laughing children, crumpled paper, and forts made from bed sheets and string, is empty now. It echoes when I walk to my room at night.

I was glad to have the opportunity to see everyone and say goodbye last week. I spent the first week of March in Sri Lanka with the other volunteers getting our visas renewed. We had a fantastic ten-day vacation there. Some of highlights included: swimming in the Indian Ocean where we met two giant sea turtles (see above) visiting some ancient Buddhist temples, and drinking lots of fresh mango juice. But just as good as this brief holiday was my return to Kerala. Coming back to Kerala and to my site at Nicholson School felt like coming home. The way some of the teachers and students faces lit up with smiles when they greeted me filled me with indescribable happiness.

We are people only through other people.

I hadn’t realized how much I loved everyone here until I had to say goodbye to them for the summer. I will see most of them again in June when next year’s school year begins, but seeing them leave was still very sad.




Love Like the Wild Geese

This week I recalled a poem by Temple Cone that is helping me remember how to plunge into my relationships with other people. To fall in love with everyone and everything without hesitation, regardless of the pain it may cause later.

If you do nothing else with your life
you can do this, you can love like the wild geese.
Because they are simple,
they do not even know what calls them
from the snow-clotted fields in spring,
only that their searing bones
light the way. Because they believe
they are immortal,
they rush over mountains, foothills, meadows
in waves of frightening speed,
since no one wants to live alone forever.

Last week I said goodbye to many people who have taught me how to be a person here in this completely different culture, but now I am starting to seek out and create new friendships that will hopefully grow with me during the summer months:

• Last Monday I visited a nearby boy’s orphanage for the first time. Though I was overwhelmed with meeting almost 50 children all at once, I spent a wonderful afternoon just hanging out with the boys. We went up to the roof where they taught me to play cricket. Using a stick for a bat and large plastic caps for balls, we played until evening fell.

• On Wednesday I sang a Malayalam song with a group of old women at an old age home, which specifically caters to the poor and to elderly people abandoned by their impoverished families. I didn’t know all the words to the song, and we sang in six different keys; but through these women, who were strangers a minute before, I am learning more about what it means to be a human being.

No one wants to live alone forever, and we are only human through our relationships with each another. After the sadness of saying goodbye to everyone for the summer, I am trying once again to plunge into new love and friendship. To rush over mountains and meadows. To let my searing bones lead me. To love deeply and all the time. To learn and relearn what it means to be a person through other persons. To try to love like the wild geese.