Yellow Maize

This story was shared at the 'Story Slam' hosted by the Northern California Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, Healdsburg, CA., May 6, 2017. The 'Third Goal' of Peace Corps is to 'promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans'. The theme for this story slam was 'Cuisine from the Heart'. 

I was 25 when I arrived in Kenya for my Peace Corps adventure. It was 1985. It was before personal computers and cell phones. It took a month for letters to arrive. I did not return home for three and a half years. 

During three months of In-country training we learned to speak Swahili. “How do you say ‘I'm a vegetarian?’” I asked. Our instructors laughed and said “the word for vegetables is 'mboga', so you can say ‘mimi mbogatarian’”. 

We also learned about Kenyan culture, history and politics. At that time there was a long drought and a lot of food aid was being sent to Kenya. But the Nairobi newspapers were full of editorials criticizing the 'Yellow Maize'. “Why are you sending us your cattle fodder? We eat white maize, not yellow maize.”  The national staple food is called ' 'Ugali' in Swahili. It is like stiff grits, and they prefer the white maize for that. I would tell them that I ate both. Yellow maize for corn bread and polenta, and white maize for grits. But that both colors were equally good. I found myself apologizing and hoping the topic wouldn't come up in conversations, but it was difficult to avoid.

My assignment was to teach women's self-help groups to build water tanks to catch rainwater from their roofs. They were newly settled subsistence farmers spreading out over the semi-arid Laikipia plain from the western slopes of Mt Kenya. The women and girls carried water in 5-gallon plastic jerrycans from the river, sometimes 3-4 miles away. Each family had to get by on just 5-10 gallons of water a day.

Working together as a group, a 500-gallon water tank would be built at the home of each member. Workdays would have 30-40 women learning and working together. I'd work with the younger women doing the building, while the older women would cook food for everyone. It was easy to be a vegetarian with these Kikuyu farmers. We would eat a maize and bean stew called 'githeri'. It had pinto beans and big whole kernels of yellow maize.  If the village was higher up on the mountain there would be potatoes, and we would eat 'Irio' which was mashed potatoes and pumpkin leaves with the maize and beans mixed in. Corn, beans, squash - the three sisters - and potatoes from the Andes. These four vegetable crops support many cultures around the world with a fully nutritionally balanced staple diet, and I was a happy ‘mbogatarian’.

One day one of the women came to greet me. “Are you an American?” she asked. “Are you sending the food aid?” Here it comes, I thought, another complaint about the yellow maize. I began apologizing and she interrupted me. “Be quiet and listen to me. My family was starving and we were given bags of maize and beans. On the bags it said ‘donated by the people of the United States of America’. You are the only American I will ever meet, and I just wanted to say thank you to someone for sending the food and saving my family.”

I understood then that despite the unavoidable corruption and flaws with the distribution of food aid, some of it actually gets to people who need it and saves lives. That was a real Peace Corps moment. But it's not the end of the story.

Building the water tank at the cattle dip. Rainwater captured from the roof is stored in the tank until the cattle are ready to be 'dipped' for protection against insects and disease.

My next assignment was to build a large tank at a cattle dip for the Maasai in the northern part of my district. The Maasai are nomadic herders of cattle and goats. It would be difficult to be an ‘mbogatarian’ in the desert, so I was told to carry in food supplies. I strapped a big bag of beans and a big bag of yellow maize to the back of my motorcycle, called ‘piki piki’ in Swahili, and headed north. The team of four masons I worked with came up with the truckload of supplies.

The Maasai had elected a family to set up a temporary camp to house us. The huts were dome shaped, made of bent over poles covered with thatch. You had to bend over to go inside. I had my own hut near the women's hut. Every morning I would stop by the mama’s hut and she would give me a big enamel mug full of sweet milky tea. They had plenty of milk from their cows, although I noticed there was very little sugar, but it was all we had to get through the day until supper time.

In the evening I would enter her hut and sit around the three stone fire, watching the women prepare food. It was smoky as there was no chimney. A couple of 5-gallon jerrycans were always around the fire. Food was very simple. Usually a thin meat stew or boiled beans and rice. I was hungry, so I politely ate whatever was served, but I wondered why we never ate the yellow maize I had brought.

At the end of the first week I went back to my town for more supplies, so I asked what I could bring them. “Sugar,” they said. I brought back a 20 lb. bag of sugar, and the morning tea was much sweeter after that.

The masons and Maasai worked together on the water tank for the communitycattle dip, Laikipia District, Kenya, 1987

Another couple of weeks went by and we were almost finished with the water tank. My mama handed me the big enamel mug in the morning as usual and I took a big gulp. Arghh! It burned like fire and made my eyes water. That was white lightning, not tea! Fire water, grain alcohol, serious hootch! The masons were giggling and suddenly I knew what had become of the yellow maize.

The mama invited me into the hut and showed me her still. It was three pots. The corn and sugar had been fermenting in those jerrycans kept warm by the cooking fire. She poured that into the bottom of one of the pots. Then she suspended a smaller pot into the larger pot using a wire harness. A second pot filled with cold water was set on top of the big pot as a lid. The fermented mash boiled and condensed into the smaller pot to create the distilled spirit. She poured the distillate onto the fire and it burned blue, which was supposed to be reassuring - meaning it was not methyl alcohol, so drinking it wouldn't make me go blind. She kept urging me to drink more, and I had a few more sips. But I had to draw the line, it was first thing in the morning after all, and handed the mug back to her half full, promising to finish it in the evening.

The masons and I headed off to work on the tank. We were laughing until we saw an entire troupe of baboons jumping around on our water tank. We stumbled down the slope shouting and waving our arms to chase them away before they did too much damage. Drunk and winded, I sat down in the shade of an acacia tree and one of the masons gave me his jacket to use for a pillow. As I drifted off into an alcohol induced stupor, I thought about how my bootlegging hillbilly ancestors had done the same thing with the corn the Native American's had shared with them. Turns out, it really IS all about the Americans and their yellow maize.

RPCV Terry Allan shares her story about 'Yellow Maize' at the 'Cuisine from the Heart' Story Slam, Healdsburg, CA. May 2017.