Patty, my temporary roommate, welcomes a variety of people into her home, which she operates as a sort of temporary/long-term “boarding house”. Some of these situations are called, AirBnB.
In a university town, we get multiple opportunities to interact with students and their families from at least 82 countries – not to mention our domestic multicultural students from varying backgrounds. It’s absolutely delightful for this social scientist! Patty, a nurse, has embraced the concept of welcoming many beautiful people in to her home, so it is today that I learn a recipe that Patty learned from her friend, Ariana from Kabul, Afghanistan. Ariana could not come to eat with us since our chicken is not halal, so Patty watched the process with her friend and fetched the spices from Ariana’s house wrapped inside a tissue. Here’s her process.
The spices: whole cumin, masala mix, and black pepper are mixed in a marinade of oil, spices, garlic, and potatoes. The chicken and potatoes should sit in the marinade for at least 45 minutes. Bake it at 325F (~150 – 170 C) for 30-45 minutes. At this point the fresh vegetables are added: onion, yellow sweet pepper, tomatoes. Patty added celery, because she did not have tomato.
While we were waiting for the chicken and vegetables to bake, we chatted about life, our jobs, our families, our preferences, and our varying critiques of political challenges in current news. To keep our appetites whetted, we enjoyed baked Brie topped with my own “signature” fig apple jam and placed on a walnut. Popped in our mouths and chased with a sip of Cabernet Sauvignon, which may not have been the perfect pairing for chicken, but it’s what I like, we waited patiently for the chicken to reach a temperature of 165 F (75 C). It began to smell so rich and savory!
As it turned out, the meal was absolutely delicious! The savory spices mingled in the thickened marinade. Patty plated the meal with a dollop of Ariana’s homemade yogurt. We ate it slowly to savor the flavors, and we toasted with a glass of wine. Patty creatively cooked the long-grain, white rice with onion, small bits of celery, whole fenugreek, whole mustard seed. She added the rice after she brought the spices and vegetables to the point of fragrance. Then she added the rice and water and cooked over medium heat with a cloth-wrapped lid. The rice cooked until somewhat dry. For extra protein, Patty added Urad Dal (split matpe beans). It gave extra body and texture to the rice.
We ended our meal with homemade hard cheese dipped in home-spun, home gathered honey! Patty’s Dad, Dean, is a bee keeper, and the honey is from his hard work. Mmmmm….
I am a geographer specializing in human systems. My passion is studying underrepresented populations so that I can assist in their integration into the communities in which they live. I studied Human Ecology because it is a wonderful blend of the disciplines of geography, anthropology and sociology. No matter the context in which I find myself, I am an observer of humans in their environments and how the influences in those settings build and nurture sense-of-self, sense-of-place, and sense-of-direction in educational, familial, and community settings. My work focuses on the cross-cultural and intercultural traditions of multi-lingual populations acculturating into their receiving communities and being successful in educational arenas of higher education. This work includes gathering, analyzing, and writing about health, well-being, and environmental/social connectedness in their communities. My research focuses on Minority-majority, rural, Midwest communities. My role as director of intercultural learning and academic success at Kansas State University allows me to discover more about myself as I work with others in their paths to self-discovery in their own interactions with students and families who come from different parts of the country and the world all converging in educational spaces. Recently, I lived, worked and played in Southwest Kansas, a region marked by Minority-majority populations centers (56% – 68%). Some of my research results are used to address poverty, low educational attainment, poor health outcomes, and cultural norms in multi-cultural settings. I work to assure a representative sample for my research, so I engage in multi-lingual research (English, Spanish, Burmese, French, Tigrinya, and Somali). Building trust and relationships is the key to my success as a multilingual researcher. Presently, my research takes me in the micro-communities of populations represented by nine African countries (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Somalia, and Cameroon), seven Latin American countries, and six Asian countries. Yes, it is rural Southwest Kansas, and many of the densely-settled and frontier rural communities act as receiving centers for refugees and other displaced populations, because of the availability of jobs.
I am the recent recipient of National Geographic Society’s Research and Exploration grant to introduce Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to females of color. This inter-generational, intercultural class hosted middle school, high school, and adult females who learned the basics of GIS with a variety of applications from remote sensing to city planning to Google Earth, and to Pokémon GO! By the time the young ladies finished the class, they were able to build cities, map their communities, log trips from their countries of origin to the Midwest. I am in the mid-year of the grant funding, and my target for completion was July 2018. I have new funding to extend this work to new cohorts.
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Patty, my temporary roommate, welcomes a variety of people into her home, which she operates as a sort of temporary/long-term “boarding house”. Some of these situations are called, AirBnB.
Human Ecology: People, Foods, Travel, Culture, and Social Justice 