Cutting a cake

My African friends here have difficulty believing I can do anything practical. I cannot carry a bucket of water on my head. I do not chop wood for the fire to cook with. I do not mop my own floors (the cleaning staff does it). I do not cook since I don’t have a kitchen. Mostly they’ve observed that I read and write. So when I announced that I knew how to bake bread and a cake, they double-dared me to teach them.

Baking bread and a cake seemed possible here at the college because it has a degree program in Hotel and Tourism Industry, which comes with a classroom full of ovens, stoves, and sinks. Unlike this very convenient set-up, many or most kitchens in the homes here are nomadic. The charcoal or wood-burning container travels from inside to outside as does the cooking pan that rests on top of it. The water is already outside, having been carried by a member of the family from the nearest outdoor tap. And when the meal is over and the dishes are cleaned, all of that moves back inside.

The regular kitchen staff here at the College also work in a large kitchen with plenty of electric stoves (no ovens), but with the frequent power outages, the staff continue to use charcoal burners outside to fry donuts, cook rice, etc.

The three of us—Rehema, Mama Catherine, and I—planned to do the baking on a Saturday when the classroom was free. But we all understood that the plan would only work if God willed it. I’m beginning to understand this. Getting the ingredients for bread and cake was a challenge. I carried sacks with two bags of flour, sugar, baking power, yeast, vanilla on a bus so crowded that I did not have room to carry the bags where I stood, wedged between a hip and a stomach. As is the custom, a polite seated passenger carried the 20-pound bag on her lap, and after 30 minutes, with a deep groan she passed it on to me as I squeezed out of the bus. That was the first grocery shopping trip. The second shopping trip, I was lucky—a bus seat was open.

The key to the classroom was in the hands of a student named Doris, but on Saturday at the appointed time, Doris was nowhere to be found. After texting her on my cell phone, I learned she’d had a family emergency and had to be away. She had arranged for another student to unlock the kitchen.

Then the bus that brought Rehema to campus broke down somewhere after Moshi Town. After an hour of waiting for the bus not to be repaired, Rehema boarded another bus and arrived a half hour after that.

At the classroom kitchen, the Rehema, Mama Catherine and I found an electric mixer, pans, bowls, mixing spoons and more. I texted Doris to ask where the measuring cups and spoons were. Doris texted back to explain that they only measured using a scale, and so I returned to my apartment to find other possibilities. I decided that one of my coffee cups was about the same size as a measuring cup by imagining a measuring cup, something I haven’t seen in three months, and comparing it to the cup in front of my eyes. It seemed close enough to me. So did the non-measuring spoon that I used for stirring tea.

Back in the kitchen, the first step for the bread was to melt butter with milk, sugar and water in a saucepan, but none of the stoves would offer any heat after I turned, pushed, and pulled knobs. Once again, Doris came to the rescue long distance by asking a fellow student to help. The student appeared, turned on a button behind the stove, and soon we were heating up butter, milk, and water.

After finishing the bread dough, we started making the cake. The first step was to cream the shortening with the electric mixer. The electricity went out just as Rehema plopped the butter in the bowl. My mind suddenly moved forward twenty steps to the part where we actually needed to bake the bread and cake. At that moment, I saw everything falling apart.

Rehema saw all of the things falling apart in my mind and announced loudly that we would continue and worry about the baking part later. Really, we had what we needed at the moment: two women accustomed to chopping wood and carrying water who could whip the hard butter into fluffy cream, no problem. After a half hour of whipping, it was good.

At that point, Nickson showed up. Nickson is a third-year student here at SMMUCo who wants to be a gospel rap singer in the States. His first week here, he asked me if I would give him lessons in English to prepare him for his career, and he has faithfully appeared every week. He is the rare kind of student who asks twenty more questions than the teacher. Nickson reviewed the recipe and wanted to know the definitions of “shortening,” “beat,” “yeast,” and so on. Plus each word reminded him of something else he’d always wondered about.

Before we succeeded in throwing Nickson out, we’d arrived at the moment when baking was imminent and electricity was not. Someone who shall not be named said that if the American (Jeanne) went to Mlay, the security guard, and asked to turn on the generator, he would do it. But I did not want to ask for the generator. It’s extremely expensive, and the College struggles to make ends meet. But the shadows were lengthening, Rehema needed to be home before dark, and we’d done so much to arrive at this point.

Nickson accompanied me to translate. Mlay said we had to ask the campus manager. Then he would find Kimbori, another security guard, to turn on the generator.

Getting deeper into unethical waters, I went back to the kitchen to make sure that this request was really worth pursuing.

Absolutely, this was important. I was teaching. Wasn’t teaching how to make a cake important? If it wasn’t important, why had I worked so hard to get there?

I made Nickson go with me to the campus manager’s house, even though the campus manager speaks fluent English. The campus manager was eating dinner with his family and graciously invited me to join his family six times. But when I asked permission to have the generator turned on for one hour, his enthusiasm fizzled. Reluctantly he agreed, and off I went with Nickson, wondering how I would pay for this misdeed. When we returned to the security guard’s station, Mlay was nowhere to be found, Kimbori was off in the village, and so we left a message with the only person there, a student worker.

By now the bread had risen well above the loaf pans, and I punched it down, and it seemed a good time to eat at the dining hall. Through the dining hall windows, I could see Kimbori walk into the maintenance building to turn on the generator after I’d taken three bites of food. I zipped back to the kitchen to heat up the oven.

Both the bread and cake needed to be baked at 375°F. The oven knob had numbers 1-11, most of them faded or invisible. I turned the knob to the random number of 8, zipped back to finish my dinner, and after returning, decided 8 wasn’t hot enough and moved the knob to 11.

Not surprisingly the heat was uneven, and both the cake and the bread developed black blobs on top. Several times during the baking, we shifted pans. The public electricity returned after an hour of expensive generator power. As we pulled the bread and cake from the oven, fully cooked with black blobs on top, we declared it all to be good especially after tasting the layers underneath.

And then it was time to cut the cake. We cut a piece for Kimbori and Mlay who caused the generator to turn on. We cut pieces for the campus manager, his wife and two children. We cut a piece for Doris, one for Nickson. We cut a piece for Esther who had saved us food from the dining hall. We cut some for Rehema’s family and Mama Catherine’s family, one for me. The cake was now totally claimed by all who had helped to make it work, not including the bus drivers and the one passenger who had to carry my 20-pound bags of groceries, or the student who turned on the stove for us. We also excluded the fifty or so students who walked past the kitchen all afternoon, stared at the cake I carried to the various people around campus.

I have now accepted an invitation to teach the same lesson again (God willing), this time using the charcoal stove with a closed box that serves as an oven. If I can get an oven to bake bread at the temperature of number 11, I can surely make a box over charcoal do the equivalent. I also have the comfort of knowing that if the electricity goes out, we will not have to resort to unethical means.