Oasis

Satya

      We have been in a food desert here in Hithadoo similar to the ones that exist in Oregon, where people have no easy access to good, fresh food.  The local convenience store, with all of its sweet and salty processed food, is their main source for groceries.
       Almost all food here is imported except for bananas and tuna.   The milk is in boxes.  The only cheese is frozen sliced and wrapped "cheese food" from Australia.    There is good frozen chicken, awful gristly fatty frozen beef, no pork of course.   The butter, imported from Germany, is very good.  The only bread is white bread.   The grocers  leave the eggs out at room temperature, reserving space in the refrigerated case for the expensive vegetables. ((When I started to cook I followed the instructions in the Joy of Cooking: always crack each egg separately. That way, if you get a bad egg, you don't ruin the whole recipe.   In 44  years of cooking, I've not had a bad egg, until now.)
    Carrots and cabbage  were the only vegetables available for the two weeks surrounding he SAARC summit.  There were not even bananas in the stores.  (That's like saying there were no  blackberries in Oregon.)  Now, we can also get large tough green beans, onions and garlic.  Our corner store often has apples, sometime oranges, and occasionally watermelon.  We drink a lot of boxed fruit juice.
    The local people eat fish and rice, often twice a day.  Where do they get fresh fish?  "Somebody brings it to us." We could go to the docks on the next island south at the time that the fishing boats come in, but  I have not bridged that cultural divide yet.  We eat the good tuna canned here in the Maldives, doing it up as we did in my childhood, with mayonnaise on white bread and potato chips inside the sandwich.
      People have banana  trees in their yards.  There is not a market in the local stores for other fruit, because it is so expensive to import.  There are a few islands in the Maldives that grow a variety of vegetables, but they are all sold to the exclusive resorts.  The mangoes on the trees of Addu Atoll are coming ripe now.  I have seen none in the stores or the roadside stands; those that are not consumed at home  go to the resorts.
     These ingredients translate into a  steady diet of grilled cheese, egg, tuna, or peanut butter sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, beans and rice.  For a treat I make French Toast.  We all eat too many potato chips and store-bought cookies.

Jambu fruit

Yams

     Our neighbors are welcoming and generous; women we hardly know press food on us.  Aisha's mother, our neighbor across the street, invited Maxine and me into her house.  As we left , she gave us two big yams.  Then she woke up her 20-year-old son to have him interpret for her while she told me exactly how to cook them.  "They will make your hands itch when you peel them," he cautioned,"so be careful."  As Maxine and I walked to the library, the young woman who works at the corner store stopped us.  "Come and see my house," she said.  She showed us her house and garden, and gave us some bags of spicy snacks that her sister had made that morning.  Later we passed a yard where 6 young men were cutting a large limb that had fallen from a tree. The tree had little yellow  jambu fruits on it.  The woman next door leaned out her doorway and put some of the fruit into Maxine's hand.  "You like fruit?"  asked one of the young men.  He went inside and came out with more of the tart, juicy fruits.
     After six weeks of a diet straight from the 1950s America, you can imagine our delight in the meal Nasreena served us at her house.  Her maid, Satya, had cooked curries and chicken and fried rice and potato salad.  A few days later, we were all discussing Nasreena's upcoming trip to Male.  "Will Satya go with you?"  I asked.  "No, would you like her to cook for you?"  We could hardly believe our good fortune.  We have hired Satya to cook for us.  For the past three nights we have had great vegetable curries with rice and chapatis, with a few pieces of grilled tuna for the non-vegetarians.  Tonight it will be chicken curry.  Satya is sheltering us in the oasis of her cooking.