Oct 28

Oct 28: Random thoughts
So on another night with no internet because the key holder is nowhere to be found, I thought I would sit down and journal about some random things. To start, my food situation. I can’t recall if I have given a general layout of what I eat every day. Now that we are almost a month in I can tell you about my new diet (at least Sunday – Friday). Every morning the cook prepares rice porridge. I have found just the right amount of sugar to mix in it to make it very good. Chihiro my Japanese friend is absolutely appalled that the Malawians put sugar in their rice, but that’s just another cultural difference. Around 10 a.m. is tea time. I sometimes grab a butter sandwich or two pieces of bread with butter in between, but I still refuse to drink the “tea” which looks more like milk with think chunks of ground coffee floating around in it. At 12:30 lunch is served and every day the main course is Nsimba, except on Tuesdays when rice is served. Lunch comes with a hearty helping of beans, soup, salad, or veggies and sometimes a small chunk of some sort of mystery beef that I am curious about, but I am hesitant to ask someone what it exactly is because I’m not really sure I want to know. Now when I say soup, salad, and veggies I know what you all are thinking, but your wrong. Soup is some kind of tomato based liquid that just seems to go on top of everything. Salad is not made with lettuce, but rather cabbage which has kind of been sautéed and little bits of tomato. The veggies taste great, I think because they have been drowned in salt, but they look like someone went down to the river and pulled up that thick grass and weeds by the bank, then threw some carrots in the mix for good measure. The beans are pretty much your typical beans. When dinner rolls around at 6:30 again the main course is Nsimba except for on Sunday nights when the meal is chicken and rice. Sunday dinners are obviously my favorite, the students do all the cooking on Sunday which can sometimes take a lot longer than normal, but that’s because they start the day off around 5 am and go buy chickens at the market. They bring the chickens home, prepare them for dinner, and then cook them. I’m going to get in the mix one of these Sundays and I’ll be sure to take a lot of pictures for all you to enjoy. I know you can already imagine me plucking and gutting a chicken, b/c unlike in the US out here we can’t just go to the store and get a nice golden rotisserie chicken for dinner. Most nights we get one boiled egg with dinner, sometimes when I can’t force Fredrick to eat he gives me his egg too. Nsimba, which I also will learn how to make, is a very simple concept. It is just watch and corn flour. You heat your water almost to a boil, then add a little corn flour and stir it in, then add some more and so on and so on. If I want a snack from the kitchen during the day Fredrick will offer me a small tomato. I actually have taken him up on that offer a few times. I know what you’re thinking mom, you couldn’t get me to eat half of this stuff my entire life and now I’m eating cabbage and tomatoes? What must this world be coming to? I also have a multi-vitamin pill every day. I have been trying to drink at least two liters of water every day as well, but sometimes I forget to boil my water the night before, and I don’t have time to do it when I wake up, so if there is water at the school I throw a bottle up on my roof for 5-6 hours and let the sun purify the H2O for me. These days are the longest; I have caught myself just trying to fill up a cup at one of the faucets in the kitchen, but always stopping myself before I do. I am excited about one thing though, I now have a plethora of water bottles and jugs, so I can now start rationing out my water for different uses when we actually get it. I have one 5 liter jug for drinking water and a few normal sized water bottles to drink from. I have 2 two-liter bottles for water purification, and another 5-liter jug for bath water since there is never enough water for me to take a quick shower, and by quick I mean less than 30 seconds, turning the water on and off. I guess bath is a bad word to use, I mean more of a cup shower, I would go into detail, but I think you get the idea. As for snacks, I have a little bag of chips and some cookies that I eat from time to time. When I get into town I like to eat chicken and chips. Chips here are kind of like French fries, but less processed, although they are served very greasy with plenty of salt. Nsimba is the food of Malawi. I think 20 people have asked me so far what kind of food I eat normally. It’s a weird question for me because they expect me to say that Americans eat rice or noodles every day, with some sort of meat every now and then, but I say it just depends on what we are in the mood for. Malawians don’t understand the concept of convenience like Americans do. If they want a different type of food than what is available, they walk 3 hrs to the market to buy something then 3 hrs back, but usually there is no complaint. With Americans, we can just jump in the car and drive to price chopper and get the meat of the day. I guess I’m just saying it’s hard to explain our life style to them without feeling like … well I’ll just let you fill in the blank.