Food 2

In my first month or so, I posted about food here in Uganda. At the time I was living in Kampala, the capital city, and I realized that since my time in the rural areas, it could use a revision.

            All right, so this is my meal everyday

            Breakfast: Well technically I skip it as the breakfast, but at around 10:30ish, is tea. There we drink tea (shocking I know) and roasted g-nuts – i.e. peanuts. I usually eat a lot of g-nuts because they taste amazing, and this functions as our breakfast. Every once in a while we’ll also have escort – bread or some sort of bakery item that’s called escort because it’s supposed to help the tea down our throats. Although tea is not breakfast, this informally serves as my breakfast.

            Lunch: The lunch break starts at around 1:15. We eat posho, rice, and a bean sauce. Sometimes there are eggplants in the bean sauce. I explained what posho is in my last food blog, but here’s a quick summary. To make posho, you mix corn-flour mixed with water over a fire until it forms a solid mixture. It is white and largely flavorless, usually eaten with a sauce. It is extremely hardy. I mean this literally: a little bit of posho lands in your stomach like a rock. I’m saying this as someone who is almost never full, but it can fill you in a matter of seconds. When there are guests visiting the school, they’ll often cook chips (chopped up potatoes, not exactly in the shape of fries, less long and skinny more short and clumpy) and a beef sauce. This is partially to give the guests a treat, and I think also is a good way to increase the quantity of food: without adding the rice, posho, and bean sauce is not enough for both the teachers and the guests.

            Dinner: I eat dinner at home with my home-stay. We usually start around 9ish. I say this pretty loosely though: dinner’s often eaten anywhere from 8 to 10. Yes, Ugandans eat dinner later than most Americans and usually go straight to bed afterwards. There isn’t a strong emphasis on eating together. More or less, the food is left on the counter with a lid over it to keep it warm, and you come get some whenever you want. You also eat in the sitting room, just sitting on a couch or any other seat (living room) not at a table. Anyways, what we normally have is sweet potatoes (not the same as the sweet potatoes in the U.S., whiter and a different shape) and a sauce. The sauce is either a bean sauce – gotten from the school and the same as that in lunch – a g-nut sauce, or a beef sauce. The last two are my favorite, and we have them with decent frequency. Now I said above sweet potatoes with sauce, which is to some extent wrong. It’ll be more accurate to say some starch is served on which you put one of the sauces. Sweet potatoes are the most common, although there are other options: rice, Irish (i.e. regular) potatoes, cassava (a starch kind of like potatoes), etc. At the school, they always eat rice and beans for dinner.

            Then there are also pineapples. Compared to the ones here, the pineapples in the U.S. are not even worthy of the name. They’re imported from a far, and in order to make them last, they’re plucked before ripe and frozen. Here the pineapples are GOOD. They grow them here. Imagine so much juice that they explode as you bite them (not joking), and more flavor than like 3 pineapples combined in the U.S.  Also they’re dirt cheap. One can buy a pineapple that is twice as big as on the ones in the U.S., say from the hand to the elbow in length, for about 60 cents. And these are the expensive ones! Normal sized ones sell for 40 and 20 if you buy them directly from the farmers. I used to think of a pineapple as a treat to be eaten maybe once a twice a year because of their price in the U.S.

            All right so that summarizes the foods for now. The focus was on everyday food. Here the food we eat is pretty routine, eating the same basic foods every day. I also added that bit on pineapples, because the pineapples are awesome here.  I’ve been told by some “experts” that Ugandan pineapples – really central Ugandan as this is where they are grown the most – have been considered the best in the world, although I have no way to check this and am told this by clearly biased Ugandans. I have reason to doubt it though.

Picture Post Take 2

So a long time ago I said I’d make another blog with pictures. I know that other HNGR blogs have included more pictures, and that mine is lacking. I have been wanting to for a while, but slow internet speeds have prevented me. Hopefully, this will partially make up. I feel bad that I am forced to separate the pictures from the previous posts – i.e. some of these pictures are months old. I was just unable to post them. Anyways, enjoy!

The first three are from Dr Lovett’s faculty visit. One day we went to a nearby rhino sanctuary where several wild rhinos live. We were pretty close to the rhinos, within about 15 feet. This was until one of males told us to back up a little. The first gives a sense of proximity as I am in the picture, although it was taken before we got a little closer. I went a few feet in front of the tree.

In this last one, Dr. Lovett and I are with Kenneth – the administrator at the school and the person with whom I stay – to the left, and the physics/computers teacher to the right. Behind us is the school.

The next picture comes from Sheema in western Uganda. There I visited a friend’s home named Stephen – on the left. The older woman was his mother and the two children his siblings, and the one on the right his cousin at her mother’s home, the main hut for which is behind us. When looking at my appearances, it should be noted that he and I had just walked 4-5 miles to get to the house (from his home with his father’s family), and it had just stopped raining when we took it.

This next two are from a different part of Sheema. In the first we were talking to church, and in the second I was giving a talk at the church (Stephen was translating). It was hard to capture the hills of the area, but there were rather pretty. I will admit, at times I wish I was in such a hilly place. Where I am is too flat, and for the record, same with Chicago.

All right, so one day the senior fives (the equivalent to twelfth grade) decided to do a photo shoot. I managed to get myself in some of the pictures myself. The first one was of everyone (not the whole class but all those who showed up to the photo shoot, about half the class). Most of these students are the ones I teach math to. For the second one, I have no idea whether I looked good in the sunglasses, but I put them one to see whether it worked, and once I did, the students wouldn’t let me take them off. Also in the background of the second (on the right), one can see the house where I stay.

The next four are from AYLF (African Youth Leadership Forum) in Kampala, which met from the 6^th to 8^th of October in Kampala. In the first two I am with two other university students. The first is from the DRC (specifically UCBC, for those who know that school), and the second is a student in Burundi. The next two were taken from a series of skits we were supposed to perform one night featuring different Ugandan ethnic groups. The first is a dance of the Acholi in northern Uganda. My friend, a student at CLA where I teach, in the last person in the line. In the second, I am doing a Karomajong dance (from eastern Uganda). The dance effectively involved jumping up and down many times, from which I am in mid-air. I was the only male in the group willing to do it, so I wound up doing it.

The last one is of my birthday party on the 9^th of October – coincidentally also Uganda’s 50^th anniversary from Independence. This was taken in the sitting room (living room in U.S. English) of our house.

When I blew all the candles out in one breath (okay fine one and a half), everyone looked at me confused. Evidently, I was supposed to blow them out one at a time, so they relit the cake to have me do it again. This was harder to do than one might initially think: it’s hard to blow out one but not blow out others nearby.

The last two are the best photos of the school I've seen. One of the students borrowed the camera and took it, and he did a rather good job. The lighting was perfect.

Long Weekend

The following was the original opening paragraph to my blog:

"I wanted to write a blog about two weekends ago. Yes, I’m now just getting to a blog about events that are approaching two weeks ago, and yes I’ve been a little slow on the blogging."

At the time I wrote the blog around October 20th, two weeks after the events described. Now it's a full month until I have enough internet to post it. I find this somewhat interesting. 

            Starting on Saturday October 6^th, I went to the African Youth Leadership Forum (AYLF), a conference on youth leadership in East Africa, sponsored by Cornerstone, the organization that I am interning with. This was held in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, but included youth from all over East Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, South Sudan, and even the Democratic Republic of the Congo. You guys may remember from a previous blog that I attended a similar AYLF conference in Nairobi in June. This is similar except a little closer to home. It featured several presentations about how to be a virtuous and effective leader, including talks by Rebecca Kadaga the current Speaker of the House in Uganda’s Parliament. The most memorable was given by Betty Bigombe who was the arbiter between the LRA and Ugandan government and has been important in the peace process in that war. It was also a place to meet new people. As I said, youth – by which I mean college-age – from many countries attended, and it was a nice way to meet peers in the area. Going to Kampala and seeing so many new faces was a nice break from life at the school, where I rarely travel more than a mile and get to meet new people. I also attended Uganda’s national prayer breakfast on Monday October 8^th.

            The 9^th, the following day, in addition to being my birthday, was Uganda’s 50^th anniversary of independence. This was a big deal, especially when I was in Kampala on the days before. There was a large ceremony in Kampala, inviting leaders from all over the world, for which I could see preparations the day before. At the school, we watched the events unfolding throughout most of the day. The fact that they turned on the TV is more significant when realized that the only other time they watch the TV is for soccer games (and only important ones at that) because the electricity is bad and reception as well. They also made a special lunch as part of the festivities. This was chicken and millet bread. The latter is a type of grain that is the main food in some parts of Uganda. I don’t know how to describe it, but the bread has the feel of bread dough (no it’s not raw despite my comparison to a raw dough), in that it is very together One rips it apart with your hands. At first I didn’t like it that much – the only Ugandan food that I didn’t – but I have grown to love it. It is a very common, everyday food in many parts of Uganda (including the West and I believe the North or at least parts of the North), but is not common here in Central Uganda, making it rare. This makes it a real treat, especially for students that come from areas where they eat it daily. Anyways, this is also the first time chicken has been served here at least in quite a while in as long as I can be here (occasionally beef is served, but chicken is exceedingly rare). It’s a nice contrast between the rice, beans, and posho that we eat everyday here.

            That day was also my birthday, which meant that multiple people kept dumping water on me – commonly done on birthdays here. That night, we had a small party at my house, which involved what may have been the best cake I ever had (I’m not exaggerating). I wish I could describe it in more detail, but I have no idea what it was made out of. I have been trying to convince its cook to give me its recipe, but I think its ingredients are a secret. I could tell was that it was part-chocolate and part some sort of red fruit that I’ve never had before. It was also like ten times as rich and dense as normal cakes. Cakes normally have air holes in them, but this one seemed to be solid cake, making it extraordinarily filling.

They did in fact light candles and put them on a cake, which I am unsure how Ugandan that is – I believe my homestay asked an American how people did birthday parties in the U.S. as he hinted at that later. Two interesting differences were that we had the cake before we ate. The idea of desert being after dinner – or eating anything after dinner for that matter – is not done here, partially I think because Ugandans eat dinner very late and usually right before bed not in the evenings. They were also surprised when I intentionally blew out all the candles at once. We did it again, and this time I was supposed t blow out each candle one at a time. I found this to be surprisingly difficult. When I’d blow out one candle, I would often blow out the one next to or behind it as well by accident. It was hard to only one. We then ate dinner which included chapattis and beef – both rare delicacies here, particularly the first one as this is only the second time I’ve eaten chapattis for dinner here on the Ranch.

After this, we socialized and played cards. This was because we didn’t have any music – all Ugandan parties involve playing music as loud as possible and dancing. Here a party without music/dancing is like a party without people – it just isn’t actually a party. I played music initially from my computer and danced for a few minutes, but because there’s no power at the house, so once my computer died, which it did pretty quickly trying to blast music, we had nothing else to play music from. We then wound up playing cards instead.

Overall it was a nice, long weekend, packed with a lot of stuff. I have pictures, and I’ll put them up in a picture blog that I have already written. I just need to get enough internet connection to post it.

As a random side, I am writing this on October 18^th, and on yesterday I officially have two months left in Uganda, until I leave on December 17^th! Time has really flown.