American Satisfaction

Surprisingly enough, one can get tired of red beans and rice after a while. Red beans and rice has been one of my favorite dishes for a long time but eating it about five times a week (minus all of the flavor that made me love it in the first place) has made me reconsider my top meals.

I was surprised upon arriving in Uganda that I liked a lot of the food they served; I was told that I wouldn't want to eat much of it. Lots of rice, spaghetti (without the sauce), potatoes, and chapat, an African tortilla of sorts, along with matooke, a signature dish made from unripened bananas. It's served like mashed potatoes and is savory, which just confuses me because when I eat it I know it is made from bananas, but it just doesn't taste like it. I have managed to solve that problem by not eating it at all. Another starchy base we tend to avoid is posho, which is ground up maize. I don't mind it that much but my team doesn't like it, so people just stopped serving it to us. This also means that in this particular instance I am the least picky eater, and considering my eating habits of the past, I deserve a gold medal. My grandfather would be proud.

Along with these heavy sides we are served either beans (quickly becoming my vice), cabbage, fish, pork, or beef. I really liked the pork and the beef when we first got into Kampala, but once we arrived in Namaliri I realized that it became increasingly harder to find a good piece of meat. Their favorite part is the fatty part, and they chop up the bones and serve them in the meat for flavoring. Knowing this I began to understand the mystery of the meat--in giving us all of the fatty bits they were just trying to serve us, most likely with the intention of making us fat in the end, which I could use a bit of, but I'm not quite sure eating pure fat is the best way to go about it.

Our Mondays in Kampala have been an oasis from the food that has become routine. We often get load ourselves with guilty pleasures and wish that we could eat for the entire week on that very day. And if the average Kampala Monday is an oasis for our stomachs, last Monday was heaven. My mother connected me with the International Mission Board missionaries in Kampala, and they invited my team to eat dinner with them and stay the night at their house (which also involved toilets and a shower. What luxury!). They overwhelmed us with grilled chicken, steak, potato salad, and green beans, along with lemonade and homemade apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert. I felt like it was summertime in America and I was at a backyard BBQ. (This feeling was also helped by the fact that I was finally surrounded by other Americans and my British teammates had become the minority).

That night I ate to the point of sickness, knowing that if I didn't eat more I would be dreaming about that plate full of chicken and steak for the entire week. I woke up the next morning, forgetting that I was in the middle of Kampala, full and relaxed, to another amazing meal. Breakfast just so happens to be my favorite, and the biscuits and gravy we were served reminded me of my last meal at Cracker Barrel before I flew overseas for the second time this year. Our hosts had fixed biscuits and gravy in particular because my teammates just couldn't fathom what it actually was--they call cookies biscuits and they only have brown gravy--so it's obvious why they didn't think it was a good plan. They also served us smoothies, fresh fruit, and coffee cake, which wasn't a good idea on their part because after that it was difficult to make us leave.

We had finally seen the light and didn't know how we were going to survive the rest of our time with age-old red beans and rice, but thankfully a package from my mother arrived that day full of goldfish, peanut m&ms, skittles, and enough lemonade to last weeks. So no need to worry, we're going to make it, but if you feel so inclined to send a piece of what has made America so overweight in my direction, I couldn't refuse:

Lacy Clark
c/o Maree Hanford
Oasis Team
PO Box 3518
KAMPALA
UGANDA