Life on the Beach

I’ve been in Tanzania for a week now.  Had to leave Uganda for a month to sort out a visa situation. So I ran away to Tanzania and am staying with Val.  Val left with her brother to go on a safari and I spend my days working on a balcony that presses against the sea.  The skyline’s to my right, the neverending Indian Ocean to my left and the stupidly blue sky above me.  It’s silly how lucky I am.  

My nights are spent getting to know the expats from Dar.  I think I might have the expat friend maker formula down:

Isn’t it hard to find men out here?  Don’t you miss cheese?  Do you want to go on an adventure this weekend?  Of course I’ll bring the wine.

And you’re in.

I spend my nights on a pillow on the balcony reading about ebola (best to be prepared), drinking wine, pretending to be an artist, wishing for a Bob Dylan of our time to step up already, rekindling neglected friendships with long emails and shaky Skype calls.

I’m still applying for jobs, and that’s still very scary.  But it is very nice to put a pin in my life and get out to the ocean.

Brooklyn Italian Christmas Eve

I grew up in a Brooklyn family.  My mom is an Irish New Yorker and my other mom is an Italian New Yorker.  Holidays were split (Irish, Gowanus, Easter/ Italian, Coney Island, Christmas Eve).  My family is loud, obsessed with food, loud, curly haired, loud.  My uncle always likes to comment on his dismay when he first entered the family. 

"You plan the menu, talk about the ingredients, talk about the prep, then finally sit down to the meal and all you do is talk about how it was made." 

In keeping with this tradition, I would like to share with you how to make a proper Brooklyn Italian Christmas Eve dinner.

For the first time since my grandfather died and my family moved to Florida, most of us are back together in the city to make the meal that my Grandpa used to make.

Christmas Dinner is the dinner of 7 fishes.  So count with me as I go along.

First you all have to get together, a week in advance, and prepare the menu.

My aunt, cousin, uncle, grandma, and mom (on speaker phone) and 3 bottles of red wine.

"Who's writing this down? Chel, get the pad. Alright, you're the note taker."

"Are you going to hurry up, I have to get all the way back to Staten Island before traffic on the Belt becomes a nightmare."

"Alright, so are we going to do the fish salad?"
"OF COURSE we're going to do the fish salad."

"Can we get it from MET food?"

"What are you sick?  I'll make the fish salad."

"Who do you think is paying?"

"You are ma."

"Ok but we're not doing the fried Bakala."

(Mom from phone perks up)

"OF COURSE we're doing the bakala, that's my favorite part!  Also it's another fish and we gotta make 7"

"Elio (my grandma's boyfriend) made an amazing crab sauce.  We have to put that on the menu."

"AND the scungilli sauce?"

"Whatever.  We have to put the crab sauce on there."

"Ok what about greens.  Broccoli Rabe?"
"Broccoli Rabe on Christmas?  Is there something wrong with you?"

"Salad.  We have salad."

"Ok I gotta go.  Don't go too crazy.  You have a $300 limit.  Go to MET food."

"Ok ma."

Next day at Fairway.

"BILLY!  We got your fish!  It's looking beautiful."

We grab handfuls of slippery calamari and put them into bags.  I picked out one medium size octopus and fluffed it up a bit to see if it would do.  

My uncle takes a look at the chopped scungilli in the case and turns to the lady with a bouffant next to him

"Do you think this will do?"

"For the fish salad?"

"Yeah."
"Nah, you gotta go for the wholes."

We pile whole scungilli  in the bag along with shrimp, one long piece of salted bakala, pastas, olives, big bag of freshly grated parmesan cheese.  Pile the groceries into the car, and told I had to be at Grandma's at 9 am to start cooking so that she doesn't freak out.

The Menu

Antipasto:

Fish Salad

Stuffed Clams 

Fried Calamari

Antipast Salad

Twisted Italian Bread with Seeds

Primo:

Long Fussiili with Scungilli sauce

Linguini with Clam Sauce

Secondo: 

Fried Bakala

Stuffed Calamari

Shrimp Scampi

Insalata:

Salad

Stuffed Artichokes

Frutta:

Fruit Salad

Dolce: 

Cannolis

Marzipan rainbow cookies

Antipasto

Fish Salad

The Fish Salad is easily the most time consuming item on the menu.  Everything is done from scratch.  First you gotta:

Crack the olives.  I'm using the bottom of a cup here.  

• Cut and clean the celery.  Cut and clean the parsley.  
• Clean the shrimp and saute, low heat with a little butter
• Clean and boil the calamari  Set aside a few tubes for stuffing later.

• Cut tubes into ringlets for the salad
• Take the scungilli and clean it well.  Rinse under water, Use your fingers to remove the "pee pee" and cut into small pieces for salad and sauce.

• Now is the fun part: Octopus (Polpo).  It's already probably been cleaned by the store, but you have to rinse it a bit more.  Then take the Octopus, put it on a butcher board, and beat the hell out of it to make it tender.  A process my grandfather used to call "Beating the polpo" and would beat it against the ground outside next to the schoolyard.

• Then, holding the octopus by the head, dip the legs quickly up and down into the pot of boiling water until the legs curl up.  Then put the whole octopus in for 5 minutes.  Remove the polpo, cut the tentacles up for the salad, and cut the head off for the kids to play with as a ball.
• Put in a large martini glass and drizzle olive oil and lemon juice

Stuffed Clams

Buy from Rocco's in Dyker Heights and serve with lemon wedges.

Fried Calamari

Buy from Rocco's.  Make sure to bring over right away and serve so don't get soggy.

Antipast Salad

Purchase: Stuffed peppers, provolone, olives (mixed), red peppers, artichoke hearts, mozzarella, balls, brined mushrooms

Bread

Twisted, Italian Bread with seeds from Cuccio's on Avenue X

Primo

Fussili with Scungilli Sauce

• Saute some garlic on low heat with top shelf olive oil until lightly browned
• Add scungilli pieces and red wine, reduce
• Add a few large cans of expensive crushed tomatoes
• Salt, Pepper more red wine
• Simmer to death, add more water when needed
• Served with Fussili, al dente

Linguini with Clam Sauce

Get Elio to make it

Secondo

Fried Bakala

• Cut salted bakala into little pieces
• Dredge in flour
• Deep Fry

Stuffed Calamari

• Stuff the breadcrumb mix (Italian Progresso Crumbs, tons of parmesan cheese, chopped garlic) into the calamari tubes that you pulled out earlier
• Roll between hands to stuff as much as possible
• Secure with a toothpick, drizzle with olive oil, bake
• Serve covered with tomato sauce

Shrimp Scampi

• Clean and saute the shrimp olive oil over medium heat
• Cover with tomato sauce, bake in oven

Salad

• It's a salad

Stuffed Artichokes

• Pick nice big green artichokes.  For your produce, go to Three Guys from Brooklyn in Dyker Heights.  It's open 24/7 and they have beautiful vegetables
• Spread the leaves on the chokes and stuff with your breadcrump mix extremely liberally
• Stand all artichokes up in a pot.  Pack 'em in so that they don't fall down
• Add water, olive oil, and white wine to the bottom of the pot, cover the pot and simmer for hours
• Using a baster, pick up the liquid from the bottom of the pot and pour over artichokes. Add more liquid when the bottom runs out

Frutta

Fruit Salad

• Strawberries, pomegranate seeds, mint, blueberries, watermelon, lemon juice

Dolce

Cannolis and rainbow cookies

Can also pick up from Cuccio's with the bread

Make sure you serve dinner with many (many) bottles of red wine, and about an hour break between each course!

My family documents the prices, menu, and reviews of the food every year in this book.  My grandpa started out writing it and now we all take turns.

Buon Appetito!

Vaccinate Your Children

In 2006, mumps, a deadly disease that had been eradicated in the US, had an outbreak with reported cases in eight states.  The outbreak occurred because unvaccinated children caught and spread the disease, resulting in 15 deaths.  When you don’t vaccinate your child you not only put your own child’s life on the line, but that of someone else’s child as well.  I’m an advocate for personal medical freedom and the rights of parents to know what is best for their children. I relish my customizable life, ringtone for every feeling, adjustable payment plans. But vaccinations are not customizable, not negotiable.  Just as drunk driving puts yourself and others at risk, not vaccinating endangers both your child and others. 

What do we do about this outbreak of non-vaccination?  Parents need to be educated about vaccinations so they can make informed decisions.   Public health officials need to take a stand before exemption becomes epidemic.  And by stand I don’t mean a seat on 60 minutes with Dr. Important “comforting” the public with his alphabet of acronyms.  In 1998, former doctor Andrew Wakefield published an article linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism.  With charisma and a strong simple message he swayed thousands of parents to question vaccination.  In response, public health officials published in the Institute of Medicine Review.  "…the body of epidemiological evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship" - a weak statement to counter the bold assertions of the charismatic doctor, unlikely to be understood by the average parent. Anti-vaccination groups are using rhetoric of the people, while public health is issuing retractions and calling for additional studies.  These limp wrists and weak fists leave parents without a reliable and convincing source of medical information on vaccine safety.  Educators need to be urgent, informative and conversational to gain the trust and understanding of the public.  In school we are taught how to appreciate foreign cultures in order to implement new public health interventions, yet we don’t understand our own culture enough to educate and influence. In order to make a policy truly effect change we need a message that resonates.  An educational campaign complete with Oprah sponsorship and “Got Vaccines?” clothes line.

When traveling in India I saw a man with polio.  Hunched over with wasted limbs he screamed in pain and for mercy.  It was nothing short of a miracle when Jonas Salk licensed the polio vaccine in 1962.  The vaccine has eliminated polio from most countries in the world, and reduced the worldwide incidence from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 1,652 cases in 2007.  Now that polio has been eradicated in the US the crippling effects of the disease are no longer visible.  Out of sight and out of mind, parents are forgetting how dangerous these diseases are and are more worried about the infinitesimal chance of adverse events following vaccination than they are that their child will suffer from deadly, debilitating diseases that struck fear in the hearts of parents a single generation before, when vaccines were not yet available. With an effective educational campaign these vaccine safety concerns will seem appropriately slight compared to the horror of polio and measles.  Public health officials need to get this message across to the public or all of the progress we’ve made will be for naught.

Proverbs don't make for good science

"Our mentor will wake up the sleeping dogs in us all."

This was one of the responses that I received on one of my tools.  Every month I receive pages of qualitative (long-response) data that I have to sift through and pull out key words so that we can measure the effectivity of our study.

"The heaven above welcomes this new knowledge."

HOW DO I CODE THAT?

I can code "dog" and "heaven"?

=COUNTIF($D$2:$D$241,"*dog*") = 1
=COUNTIF($D$2:$D$241,"*heaven*") = 5

So our study is working?

???

Bridal Showers

When a woman gets married, the ladies in her life get together to give her advice on her marriage.  They throw her a Bridal Shower. 

Last week, I went to a Ugandan bridal shower for a coworker.  We ate, gave thoughtful and (almost) dirty advice to the bride, gave gifts and played games. “What was Annette wearing when she first entered the room?”

It was really no different from the many (many) bridal showers I have been to in the US or even India.  But this isn’t one of those “women are the same all over the world and isn’t that beautiful” kind of entries.  Because there was a difference in what I saw at these parties.  It was subtle but crucial.  The advice on marriage was all different. 

“There’s not much to tell,” said an older Indian woman with dhaal stained fingertips.  “You’ve already seen the guy.  That is half the battle.”

And the conversation was closed about the husband.  For the rest of the party.

“Know how to make a good sabji and listen to every word she says.”

“Know how she cleans.  It’s important to know how she cleans.”

The advice was all about the mother in-law and food.  And how to make the food for the mother in-law.  

“You know how to make a good kitchari, right?”

The husband was barely mentioned.  He was an accessory to the marriage between bride and mother in-law.

A happy mother is a happy marriage.

“Just make sure you know how to please yourself.”

“ You can’t rely on a marriage to make you whole.”

In the US, the advice is about how to make the bride happy and how to sustain the love. 

“Make sure you two have activities outside the house together.”

“Go out to eat!”

“Travel together!”
“But never forget about ‘you’ time.”

A happy wife is a happy marriage.

“He will be a child,” advised the eldest woman at the Ugandan bridal shower. “You will need to know how to take care of him.”

“We work hard all day, but when you get home he will be expecting a smiling wife, happy and loving.  You need to be that woman.”

The Ugandan advice was all about the husband and how to make him happy.

“Stay pretty so he won’t stray.”

A happy husband is a happy marriage.

And the subject of babies?

“Have them soon, she’ll expect them. Hope it’s a boy!”

“Have them soon, he’ll want a big family.”

“Have them soon, nobody wants to be an old mom.”

Check.

Check.

Check.

Not sure about the secret to marriage but there is a worldwide consensus that I need to start having babies soon.

I better go massage my ovaries. 

Help who you know

Help who you know, where you know, what you know.  Help your neighbors, clean up your backyard.  Black people are being shot on your block.  Veterans are dying of starvation, in the winter, outside of Madison Square Garden.  Why travel to Africa and Asia when homeless shelters in Brooklyn are turning away women and their children every day?

This is a question that I have been grappling with for a better part of my adult life.  These are my answers:

1. I’m an epidemiologist.  Where are the coolest diseases in the world?  In the Amazon, in Calcutta, in the valleys of Uganda.  That’s where shit gets exciting.  And yes, Washington D.C has 155 people per 100,000 diagnosed with HIV in 2011.  The highest in the country.  (Talk about helping your backyard Obama…) But the truth is, I like my diseases vector borne.  Give me a mosquito over a young male any day.  And that’s the truth of it.  I want the ebola epidemic not the obesity epidemic.
2. I’m not digging a well, I’m running a study.  I was given the resources to get an education that lets me do what other cannot.   I teach people what I’ve learned.  I work with the ministry to help their counterparts achieve what they want to see happen in their country.  Give a (wo)man an insecticide treated mosquito net, protect him for 3-5 months.  Teach a (wo)man how to run a randomized control protect him from malaria for life.  Kind of.  And when my students become teachers I have worked myself out of a job.  Again.  It’s beautiful really.  Kind of.
3. I’m grateful.  That the work I do in these countries gives me so much.  It’s exciting, sexy, enriching.  I learn from learning.  My cat has become the most cultured animal in the world.  I love that my work takes me to clinics on the Rwenzori mountains.  That I roll my eyes with annoyance when a monkey delays my car.  I’m over here for an adventure and I still want a few more years of it.

I’ll return to the US to help my neighbors one day.  But for now I’m following the mosquitoes.

One of my clinics.  Jelly?

Transience

I am (so) aware that this is the life that I’ve chosen.  I want to live a life where, at the end of the day at the dinner table, I could feel I did good.  That’s what I tell people.  Where at the end of my life I can see the little ripple I made and hope it doesn’t break too soon on the shore.  That’s what I tell myself.

But sometimes I feel like I’m trying to make a ripple in a hurricane. 

My contract is over and once again I’m looking for a job.  Once again I’m uprooted and uncertain and alone.  It’s exciting, isn’t it?  I’m looking at jobs in Cambodia, Myanmar, Swaziland and India.  Another adventure! 

But I’m watching my ex-boyfriends get married.  My friends have babies.  And I’m…moving again.  I do it because I love it but this love keeps tossing me around.  HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO SAVE THE BABIES IF YOU KEEP MAKING ME START OVER?  Shouting into a fundless storm. 

So come March I may have to pack my bags, and my damn cat, and move.  But I’m young, and I’m free and I do what I do because I love what I do.  I’ll start new and keep going on going on because I’m not ready to slow yet.  I hear Cambodia has some of the most beautiful temples in the world.

Fuck the ripple.  I’m going to make a tidal wave.