Fun food facts

Uganda’s geography is very different from ours, as they are close to the equator.
Day break is at 6am and nightfall is between 6 and 7pm daily, all year round.
They only have two seasons here, rainy and dry. It is currently the rainy season.
It rains every day for a little while. I seriously need to find some rain boots. The
temperature is very pleasant.  In the week I’ve been here it has not been above
78 degrees. I have a hate/ hate relationship with a rooster near my apartment.
He starts crowing at 4 am, two hours before my alarm goes off. There is also a
cow somewhere near here but I am not sure where. I can hear everything very
well because the tops of the windows are actually just wooden slats and not glass
windows. This is to allow a breeze to continually flow, as no one that I have
encountered here has air conditioning. And quite frankly, the temperature is so
pleasant that no A/C is needed.

A little bit about what I am eating here.  My first evening here I met with some staff
from the school and we went to a restaurant next door to my apartment. I had a
vegetable samosa, which is a fried vegetable pie, and a cup of excellent African
spiced tea. I loved it so much that I have found the spice blend at the supermarket
up the block from my apartment. The supermarket has two floors, groceries on the
bottom floor and everything else on the top floor.  It is a super Walmart on steroids.
It is located inside the hugest market I’ve ever seen in my life called Capitol
Shoppers Market. Seriously, if you can’t find it here then it doesn’t exist. Most of
the vegetables in the market are local products and - not kidding- still have some
dirt on them. Capitol Shoppers has several restaurants inside of it, one of which--
Taste Budz -- I visited on Tuesday and purchased Pizza and french fries -- which
they call chips, like the British do. The french fries were yellow but tasty. I did not like
the vegetable pizza. The tomato sauce wasn’t “tomatoey” enough. On a good note,
the cheese didn’t bother my stomach as much.  And, FYI, there is a surcharge on
to go orders at some restaurants here. There is an amazing vegetable
and herb garden maintained by the agriculture classes at KCS. It has tomatoes,
eggplant, spinach, collards, peppers, onions. Madame Patricia

actually had some staff members pick me some fresh kale (what we call collards)
and bananas, which were delicious. I had my first faculty lunch on Friday. The
teachers all eat at the same time and in the staff room, separate from the students
who have their own eating space under a very large shed. Part of what we had for
lunch is apparently a national dish in Uganda, called matooke. If I understood
correctly, it is mashed with flour and steamed in banana leaves. They usually top it
with a ground nut (peanut) paste called binyebwa. Again, if I understood correctly,
the nuts are either roasted or raw peanuts, pounded into a type of meal (like we do
for corn meal) and mixed with something to make it a paste or sauce. The matooke
is very dry so the binyebwa sauce is a must.  They are quite good together. Also
there was herbed rice, a bean dish, some type of fresh picked greens that were
cooked with red onion, and a mashed corn dish.

I had a very similar meal when I
visited the Ndere Centre (more about that in my next post), but I also had Ugandan
sweet potatoes and yams. Their sweet potatoes are actually white, and the yams
are a speckled purple. The terminology throws me off sometimes. When they first
mentioned sweet potatoes I of course thought of the orange sweet potatoes we have
back home.