"[Matooke] is a good meal for infants because it has no fat, is easy to digest and very few babies are allergic to it."
-Food Scientist Umar Mutuya, Kampala, Uganda (As reported in The New Vision newspaper)
Matooke, the plantain mush staple food of East Africa, may just be the answer for the millions of Ugandan babies who are currently watching their diaper sizes and/or are concerned with the notorious nipple-allergy epidemic encircling the globe. Whereas the majority of babies in America are devoted to the high-fat, protein-rich, so-called “Breast Milk Diet” which has unfortunately resurfaced in popular culture after many years of fruitless counter-efforts made by the trustworthy Nestle Co. and workplace maternity policies nationwide, at least one food scientist now recommends Ugandan babies take control of their swollen bellies one fat-free banana at a time.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
you can stare all you want, but i'm not taking my shirt off
In 7th grade I was forced to stare into a woman’s vagina for 27 painfully awkward minutes. The film was called The Miracle of Birth, and I suppose it was meant to be educational, but to me and my classmates it was pure pornography. Afterward at lunch, as I ate my corndog in a guilty silence, I vowed to never let myself witness a miracle, any miracle, ever again.
Twelve years later, this vow is what’s on my mind as I watch a Ugandan woman writhe in pain on a plastic sheet. The nurse-midwife tells me the woman’s fully dilated and ready to push, then leaves the room. Tea break? I stand there and fidget awkwardly, unsure of the cultural protocol. I’ve never met this woman before, but I’ve come specifically to stare into her vagina in hopes of witnessing The Not-Quite-Miracle of Science. Do I introduce myself? Ask her how her morning has been? That seems insensitive. Tell her about my 27 minute training in labor and delivery? I approach the bed and she grabs my arm; suddenly I’m her birthing coach. “Uh, hi, I’m…just…breathe! Yeah, you’re breathing really well! Thank you for, um…your work.”
The woman lifts up her gown and for a split second, I think she’s spilled a can of soup between her legs. For another split second, I think about how much I love soup, and for a third, I think about how in the future, soup will always have this association for me, how soup is probably ruined for me forever, even Campbell’s Select Harvest Mexican-Style Chicken Tortilla, and how it’s all her fault, selfish laboring woman that she is.
The woman yells; I yell louder. I pry her fingers off my arm and start running from the room, presumably to look for help but possibly to escape the stressful situation entirely. Then I hear it: a baby’s cry, or what a baby’s cry might sound like if a Campbell’s factory worker accidentally delivered her baby into a vat of soup. Campbell’s maternity leave ain't what it used to be. I glance back toward the woman’s bed and there he is: ten blue fingers, ten blue toes, delivered by nobody into nobody’s hands. My first instinct is to pick the baby up; my second instinct is to yell again, if not for help than for his pathetic blue-figured sake.
The midwife rushes back into the room and gets right to work. I momentarily consider sniffing her breath for tea. She tells me to glove up and I realize I’m officially part of this. She clamps and cuts the cord and hands me the baby. I’ve seen this on T.V., of course, but here there’s no bulb suction to suction, no warmer to warm, and no handsome doctor to stand around and be handsome. So I swaddle him. I tell him out loud that I’m sorry, and that I should have been there to catch him, and that his life will probably get better than this depending on the Ugandan government’s future response to necessary education and healthcare policy reform and/or the end result of the world food crisis. I sense this baby is a realist. I secretly name him Benjamin.
Benjamin enthusiastically spits up on me, but after that he seems fine. He keeps staring at my left breast and puckering his lips. I sense this baby’s going to be a ladies' man. I hold him for around an hour, long enough for the mother to clean up, put on a prom-worthy gown characteristic of all important, not-so-important and altogether trivial events in Uganda, step into the hallway to make a few phone calls, send a few text messages to friends, take a short nap, and only then ask to see her son. I consider telling her she’s interrupting the vital bonding period characteristic of the first few hours of an infant’s life but ultimately and regretfully hand him over.
Afterward at lunch, as I ate my boiled pumpkin in an overwhelmed silence, I decided birth is probably the most disgusting, incredible, wonderful, horrifying thing I’ve ever seen.
Twelve years later, this vow is what’s on my mind as I watch a Ugandan woman writhe in pain on a plastic sheet. The nurse-midwife tells me the woman’s fully dilated and ready to push, then leaves the room. Tea break? I stand there and fidget awkwardly, unsure of the cultural protocol. I’ve never met this woman before, but I’ve come specifically to stare into her vagina in hopes of witnessing The Not-Quite-Miracle of Science. Do I introduce myself? Ask her how her morning has been? That seems insensitive. Tell her about my 27 minute training in labor and delivery? I approach the bed and she grabs my arm; suddenly I’m her birthing coach. “Uh, hi, I’m…just…breathe! Yeah, you’re breathing really well! Thank you for, um…your work.”
The woman lifts up her gown and for a split second, I think she’s spilled a can of soup between her legs. For another split second, I think about how much I love soup, and for a third, I think about how in the future, soup will always have this association for me, how soup is probably ruined for me forever, even Campbell’s Select Harvest Mexican-Style Chicken Tortilla, and how it’s all her fault, selfish laboring woman that she is.
The woman yells; I yell louder. I pry her fingers off my arm and start running from the room, presumably to look for help but possibly to escape the stressful situation entirely. Then I hear it: a baby’s cry, or what a baby’s cry might sound like if a Campbell’s factory worker accidentally delivered her baby into a vat of soup. Campbell’s maternity leave ain't what it used to be. I glance back toward the woman’s bed and there he is: ten blue fingers, ten blue toes, delivered by nobody into nobody’s hands. My first instinct is to pick the baby up; my second instinct is to yell again, if not for help than for his pathetic blue-figured sake.
The midwife rushes back into the room and gets right to work. I momentarily consider sniffing her breath for tea. She tells me to glove up and I realize I’m officially part of this. She clamps and cuts the cord and hands me the baby. I’ve seen this on T.V., of course, but here there’s no bulb suction to suction, no warmer to warm, and no handsome doctor to stand around and be handsome. So I swaddle him. I tell him out loud that I’m sorry, and that I should have been there to catch him, and that his life will probably get better than this depending on the Ugandan government’s future response to necessary education and healthcare policy reform and/or the end result of the world food crisis. I sense this baby is a realist. I secretly name him Benjamin.
Benjamin enthusiastically spits up on me, but after that he seems fine. He keeps staring at my left breast and puckering his lips. I sense this baby’s going to be a ladies' man. I hold him for around an hour, long enough for the mother to clean up, put on a prom-worthy gown characteristic of all important, not-so-important and altogether trivial events in Uganda, step into the hallway to make a few phone calls, send a few text messages to friends, take a short nap, and only then ask to see her son. I consider telling her she’s interrupting the vital bonding period characteristic of the first few hours of an infant’s life but ultimately and regretfully hand him over.
Afterward at lunch, as I ate my boiled pumpkin in an overwhelmed silence, I decided birth is probably the most disgusting, incredible, wonderful, horrifying thing I’ve ever seen.
Monday, May 2, 2011
see guys, i'm one of you...now please wash my towels for a quarter
Evidently, all humans have this thing called “DNA”, and inside this DNA are things called “genes”, and inside these genes are things called “genetic-markers” which “scientists” can “use” to “trace” the journey of “man” back 200,000 years. And apparently, as a result of our genetic-markers, every human on earth can be traced back to two Africans known in the hippy-science world as Scientific Adam and Eve.
Far be it for me to trust a man named Spencer, but according to geneticist Spencer Wells of the Genographic Project, Scientific Adam and Eve spent their entire lives somewhere between my coffee table and the beans n' beans stand down the road, as did their inbred offspring and their inbred offspring’s inbred offspring and so on, until an extremely-inbred somebody decided to get the hell out of Africa.
Perhaps this somebody was forced out due to hilarious inbred disfigurement or perhaps they left with the correct number of toes and visions of a little thing called the instant fireplace. We can’t be entirely sure. If you can trust a man named Spencer, they probably crossed the southern tip of the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula just 60,000 years ago in response to scarce resources- as if scarce resources are a legitimate reason to build a raft. Please. I ran out of toilet paper last week and stood my ground. In fact, I run out of toilet paper every week and continue to stand my ground, in no part due to my lack of raft-building skills or proximity to a viable water escape-route.
Spencer and his posse claim He Who Feared Scarce Resources and his posse made their way out of eastern Africa into the Middle East via the Red Sea, shuffled up through a fabled land called Central Asia, where people love to shuffle, headed east across an alleged iceberg which we’re to believe connected the far east of Russia to the future Palin family breeding grounds, and then proceeded to trek all the way down to the southern tip of South America- all in all, the longest journey man has ever made.
Flash forward 60,000 minus two years- you do the math, mathlete- and I’m shuffling down a narrow isle at 30,000 feet in search of a bag of scarcely-salted airline pretzels. It seems like a cruel joke that an $800 plane ticket was enough to undo thousands upon thousands of years of painstaking efforts made by my ancestors to get the hell out of Africa, or that I’m back to where I started without the evolutionary benefits of melanin or blind faith in God on public transportation, but no matter; I’ve had a vision, and in five months I’m departing this continent in search of a little thing called the instant fireplace. Or whatever that little taco-shell warmer at Taco Bell is called.
Far be it for me to trust a man named Spencer, but according to geneticist Spencer Wells of the Genographic Project, Scientific Adam and Eve spent their entire lives somewhere between my coffee table and the beans n' beans stand down the road, as did their inbred offspring and their inbred offspring’s inbred offspring and so on, until an extremely-inbred somebody decided to get the hell out of Africa.
Perhaps this somebody was forced out due to hilarious inbred disfigurement or perhaps they left with the correct number of toes and visions of a little thing called the instant fireplace. We can’t be entirely sure. If you can trust a man named Spencer, they probably crossed the southern tip of the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula just 60,000 years ago in response to scarce resources- as if scarce resources are a legitimate reason to build a raft. Please. I ran out of toilet paper last week and stood my ground. In fact, I run out of toilet paper every week and continue to stand my ground, in no part due to my lack of raft-building skills or proximity to a viable water escape-route.
Spencer and his posse claim He Who Feared Scarce Resources and his posse made their way out of eastern Africa into the Middle East via the Red Sea, shuffled up through a fabled land called Central Asia, where people love to shuffle, headed east across an alleged iceberg which we’re to believe connected the far east of Russia to the future Palin family breeding grounds, and then proceeded to trek all the way down to the southern tip of South America- all in all, the longest journey man has ever made.
Flash forward 60,000 minus two years- you do the math, mathlete- and I’m shuffling down a narrow isle at 30,000 feet in search of a bag of scarcely-salted airline pretzels. It seems like a cruel joke that an $800 plane ticket was enough to undo thousands upon thousands of years of painstaking efforts made by my ancestors to get the hell out of Africa, or that I’m back to where I started without the evolutionary benefits of melanin or blind faith in God on public transportation, but no matter; I’ve had a vision, and in five months I’m departing this continent in search of a little thing called the instant fireplace. Or whatever that little taco-shell warmer at Taco Bell is called.
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