Jane Baker Lotter grew up in Berkeley, California. After graduating from the University of California she and her husband, Will Lotter, raised four sons in Davis, California where they have lived for most of fifty years. Will is now a retired University of California Davis professor and athletic coach. Together they are involved in human rights work in Central America. Jane's hobby is painting portraits of indigenous peoples. This is her first book.
Take one ordinary 1960s American family - husband, wife, and four active boys from three to twelve. Add a Peace Corps staff assignment to Malawi, Africa and more than ninety letters home. Stir well, edit liberally, and you get To Africa With Spatula. This is the story of our family's two-and-a-half years of adventures (and misadventures), and especially of our growing and enduring love for this tiny, beautiful African country and its people.
I don't know what I expected when we eagerly boarded the plane that would take us from our home in quiet Davis in Northern California, to Malawi, Africa, where my husband was to be a Peace Corps staff member, but it certainly wasn't swabbing trees with leopard repellent. Or standing alone in the African bush with my four little boys at sundown beside our wrecked Jeep, a hundred miles from the nearest town - watching my husband walk into the distance flanked by two spear-carrying Masai tribesmen. Or receiving a formal complaint from our next-door neighbor, Malawi President Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, that my youngest son's drumming was interrupting his naptime.
With four busy young sons, life was fraught with adventure no matter where we happened to be. Happening to be in Africa doubled (no - quadrupled) the exciting things to write home about.Ê
Every aspect of life in Africa seemed especially close at hand: birth, death, joy, sadness, snakes, leopards, fear, hilarity, weddings, embarrassments, malaria, burglars, spiders. I wrote about it all. Mothers will relate to the "everydayness" of simply constantly being a mother, even though everything was different there: the cooking, the shopping, the driving, the language, the customs, even the simple doing of the laundry.
My sense of humor got me through many a harrowing time and it was the funny things that I most enjoyed writing about. Like the time I was sweltering on a dusty road in the hot African sun, with a flat tire and a locked-on spare with no key, my helpful passengers being a hungry baby goat, a frantic new pet monkey trying to escape her cage, a squawking hen, and a fussy four-year-old human.
I did not enjoy writing about the sad things, many times crying all over my typewriter. But they are all there. I still need a kleenex when I look over some of them. They are part of the whole experience.
The book title, "To Africa With Spatula," was inspired by our favorite family activity, Sunday morning pancake open houses which we held to give the Peace Corps Volunteers a little touch of home.
Make no mistake - our experiences as a salaried Peace Corps Staff family were entirely different from those of the Peace Corps Volunteers. We had a nice house and we had a car. We did not have to walk or ride bicycles everywhere. We did not live as the village people lived. We did not live in a mud hut with thatched roof (much to the disappointment of our sons). We did not live "poor." For the Peace Corps Volunteers, who usually lived much like their Malawian counterparts, I have the utmost respect and admiration.
Africa and the whole Peace Corps experience got into our blood and forever changed the lives of our entire family.
Jane Baker Lotter
April of 2002
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