Cooking in Uganda... easier said than done

What a busy last few days. I spent this last week still with my host family, traveling to their home each evening after my classes. On Thursday night, I made them dinner… pasta with tomato sauce. Who would have thought I’d learn to cook in Africa? Boy did I take the microwave and stove top for granted at home in America! I made sauce from scratch… have I ever made sauce from scratch? Nope. But I did on Thursday! And it came out pretty good. I loaded it with veggies (eggplant, onions, peppers, garlic, tomatoes) because I rarely get to eat any. Well, it turns out the Ugandans aren’t a huge fan of vegetables. For us, the vegetables are SO cheap here. I would think they would have eaten them all the time. But they really only use them for flavoring on their meats, they don’t eat them like we do. I think that they don’t find them filling enough and it would be too expensive to feed such large families on vegetables.

So they picked at the pasta, and choked down the sauce. I was a little angry because the 18 year old, Prose, who does all the cooking for the family everyday, had such an attitude that night. And she picked at the sauce, smelled it, made a face, put it down and didn’t eat it. If I had no self control, I would have yelled something like “Oh my God, Prose, I eat your gross plantains every day and I don’t EVER make a face!!!” But of course, I didn’t yell such a thing… I just laughed. Sometimes there’s nothing I can do but laugh here… because if I didn’t laugh, I’d probably cry haha. So we USP students spend as much time as we can laughing off the tough situations. The adults were fairly polite about it, even though I could tell they didn’t like it… and the kids just made me laugh because they were trying so hard to choke it down with a smile.

It’s very interesting because in America, we have such a variety of foods that we are very accustomed to liking and disliking foods, and also learning to fake that you like things to be polite. But Ugandans have pretty much the same basic 10 or so foods… and they like them all. So being exposed to something they don’t like is a tough situation for them, and they are fairly open about disliking it. It’s kind of funny actually.

But luckily… I decided to redeem myself by cooking breakfast for them on Saturday morning before I left. What a success!! I made French toast and scrambled eggs (also had never made French toast before then.) Now you in America are thinking to yourselves “oh those are pretty easy things to make.” No. It wasn’t. Let’s go through the process here… first it took an hour or so to go get the ingredients on Friday night. I had to buy eggs, which are fresh brown ones that they put in a plastic bag when you buy them. Kinda weird. Then milk….which comes in a bag. And my family didn’t have a refrigerator so I had to create my own. I put cold water in a bucket and put the milk in it, then left it outside over night so it would stay cool. It turned out fine. I also had to get bread, cinnamon, and vanilla. After buying all the stuff, I walked the 20 minutes home with my bags. Not fun. Then Saturday, we had to start up the charcoal “stove” type thing and let that get hot. Then I had to cook the toast in a pot… because frying pans are hard to come by. A pot… that’s not very easy to make French toast in for the record… and without a spatula. Then the bread started falling apart… because the bread here ALWAYS falls apart. It’s perpetually stale and really hard. But so it goes.

So the final product… a whole loaf of French toast “pieces” covered in margarine so they wouldn’t stick to the pot and a load of scrambled eggs. I served it and they LOVED it. They love sweet things… and didn’t care the French toast pieces were all broken, because we ate with our hands anyway. So at least they liked one meal! And I was pretty glad to eat some American food.

Our departure on Saturday was bittersweet… I was DEFNITELY ready to leave and be home in my dorm room and get some alone time. But I also had a very fulfilling two weeks, where I learned more than I could have ever anticipated. Mzumba prayed for us before we left, and they family kept thanking us for the gifts we gave to them the night before. It’s amazing how much they appreciate such small things. All in all, I’m glad I’m back at school, but I’m very thankful for my experience. I’m sure I will continue to go back there to visit often throughout the semester.

Saturday was a very eventful, exciting day… but I’ll save that for another entry. Be well!