There is a reason why I usually never leave the kitchen whenever I am cooking there: I do not want to burn down the house by forgetting a pot of food on the hot cooking gas while I’m in my room reading or writing. I know myself. I think I have a very short attention span when it doesn’t have to do with something mentally stimulating. Food tops that list, and I have had to go hungry so many times because I would rather watch a movie, read an article or just stay in one spot thinking of the next mischief.
So on getting back from a long day of school yesterday, I didn’t bother to take off my back pack. I just went into the kitchen and started making pasta and soup on two of the four gas cookers there. In twenty minutes, I was done and the food was sizzling hot on the plate. But instead of sitting down in the living room to eat, I headed into my room, but not before putting the almost empty pot back on the gas cooker, and turning the knob to be sure that I had put off the fire and the gas.
Two minutes later, while in my room, and about to settle into my comfort zone of work, I became uncomfortable because I wasn’t sure whether or not I had refilled the water bottle in the fridge, so I dropped my food and the laptop, and went there just to be sure, only to find that the half empty pot of pasta was still on a burning hot cooker, almost burning itself out from excessive heat. What? I thought I switched this off. Apparently, I had turned it the wrong way, and instead of shutting off the fire, had only turned it up. Sigh. I then switched it off for good, refilled my water bottle, and went back indoors to enjoy my meal and work. It would have been a very fiery day in Cougar Village, and I can already imagine the headline: “Curious Foreign Language SKolar Roasts Self in Building Fire.”
That didn’t happen, and thus my testimony. Praise the Lord! Halleluyah! Amen!.
Offering time…!
The heaviness on my person since I returned from Washington DC on Monday, I have realized, has to do with more than just my delirious nostalgia for the taste of a certain thrill and an unexplainable positive strangeness that dominated that trip to the East. It could easily have been because of the food, because it was the one thing that almost equally matched the large number of workshop sessions that followed each other one after the other, sometimes without much of a breathing space. We got out of one conference workshop session and we hopped right into another. It was mostly worth it, but it will take the whole of my holiday to truly catch up with the details of all that we were taught. The food however was a different matter. They were diverse as they were elaborate, and I left that hotel on Sunday feeling that I’d committed an unforgivable sin of indulgence – as my mum would have called it. In any case, it was scarcely two hours after then before I entered another cycle of feeding, this time in the neighbouring state of Maryland, and the foods (most of it) were Nigerian for a change.
It was just as well a case of serendipity, because when I went out 
It was serendipity because just last week, the class consensus was an almost riotous but endearing request for Nigerian food before the end of the course. And as much as I tried to dodge the issue citing inability to get the foodstuff as well as the problem of conveying it to class in hot condition, I still wanted to give them an experience of the taste of Nigerian food and I despaired in me about how impossible it was going to be, especially since I feared a possible lawsuit from anyone that might find discomfort after a meal, and hold the teacher – me – responsible. But they made it clear that they wanted it too, so I spoke with Tola – a former FLTA (now a graduate student in the University) who said that we could work something out only if I could find the foodstuffs, and perhaps obtain a written consent from them absolving us of liability. It would prove not to be necessary in the end, as I luckily got sufficient plantain from the African shop, and woke up early enough today to prepare it to the best of ktravula‘s kitchen standards.
With this, my teaching class for this semester has now come to an end. The class that 
Here’s one of the most interesting displays of democratic ideals in the United States of America: a set of turkeys – yes the animals and not the humans from the country of Turkey – are 
In any case, there was no such presidential decree, ceremonial or otherwise, in Edwardsville today as I stepped out of the house to my host’s Thanksgiving get-together. And God bless them too. Even if I was a vegetarian, today was one of those days when it was better to renounce the faith for the good of all humanity, and peace on earth. Well, maybe I exaggerate. In short, I had a very nice day. The food included turkey, of course, turnips, smoked bacon, bread, crab and sausage stuffing, green beans, potato pie (the real sweet potato), chocolates, whipped cream, ice cream of different flavours, sweet corn, cranberry sauce, salad and other fruits and drinks (sparkling wine, white wine, red wine, mojito and margaritas) – a very traditional American meal.
The get-together also included a diverse mix of people: My hosts, their beautiful daughter and her partner both from the state of Utah, their friends, neighbours white and black, acquaintances, a few elderly women looking gorgeous and us – the Africans. We had gone there with a Thanksgiving card, one of the ones that I bought since a few weeks ago, as well as a copy of Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun as a kind of present, which they both greatly appreciated. The repercussion of that thoughtless decision is now that I had to leave the house when the gathering eventually dispersed with a huge paper sack of very many great used books of fiction, history, non-fiction and poetry which, according to my host were already slated for giving away before we showed up. He loves us, that man, and he has asked us to come back for as many more books as we want, for his giving away. One of the things that North America is full of, if I may assume, is plenty great books to which I would never say no.