“The bell has rung!”

A few weeks ago I managed to get internet access on the mobile phone that I use (thanks auntie!). I tried to post on my blog but in spite of blogspot's promise of success it didn't seem to have worked. I wonder where that post ended up...

Anyway, so a few people have been asking me a very important question: What is the food like? Well, it’s different, of course, mostly. They do have spaghetti, rice and potatoes here, but besides that they have two dishes you won’t see in the Netherlands, namely ugali and makande. And here we have a warm meal at lunch too. But besides breakfast, lunch and dinner we hardly eat anything.

For breakfast we have white bread. It’s home baked, and I very much like it. Unfortunately there isn’t anything to put onto the bread, so it’s just that and tea in the morning. There used to be jam and butter, but I think that became a little too expensive. They say bread is very “YWAM” though – they will remember YWAM for it.

Then there is ugali. It’s basically a white, tasteless mass. Apparently it’s made from grinded, dried corn, but you really can’t tell if you see it. But as bad as it sounds, it’s actually ok to eat, if you have an equal amount of sauce or something else to go with it. We have it for lunch every single day here, which to be honest is a little hard to take for me. They absolutely love it here – it takes the same place as bread does in Europe. There’s places here where they have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner... I have no clue how they manage. It’s very heavy, I think you need at least four times as much spaghetti to fill the same space in your stomach. Thankfully the people at the base now have alternatives during lunch too, that’s quite a blessing.

For dinner we have rice, spaghetti or makande. That last one is made from dried rice as well, though it isn’t grinded. They boil it together with beans for some two hours. It’s quite alright I suppose.
The sauce they add isn’t quite like what I’m used to. They call it “soup” here, and often it actually is a kind of soup. But it works fine, and every now and then dinner can be very enjoyable.

One disappointment a foreigner might have is the lack of meat, it really is a luxury here. We have meat or big fish once or twice a week. Chicken I had exactly once so far, I got a part of its spine. Since it’s luxury I guess, they eat everything. Not only meat, but also great lumps of fat, chicken feet – one fellow teacher will even eat fish eyes. “Yes, it’s part of fish!” I was lucky enough to find two in my soup yesterday. Luckily enough I only have to worry about that once or twice a week... We have “small fish” more often though. It’s really just that – many tiny fish, each is I think about an inch long. It goes with ugali during lunch, and is just fine to eat.

Instead of meat they like to have beans a lot, which sometimes causes trouble in class. One student coined the phrase “to make Mbagala”, after an explosion in Tanzania’s ammunition depot in Mbagala.

One more interesting thing is their love for salt, they put surprising amounts of it on their food. Their love for sugar is just as big – most have about three spoons per cup, some even have six. I don’t think they’d want to drink tea without any.

I’m still good after well over a month, so the food must be just fine for me.