Sunday’s are what I imagine Sunday’s in the United States must have been like in the day of my parents. Everyone enjoys a full two extra hours of sleep, meaning they awaken somewhere around nine in the morning. Next we have a large breakfast, complete with an omelet, bread and tea. This starkly contrasts breakfast during the rest of the week, which includes bread on which is spread some sort of butter substitute known only as “blue band”, and a cup of African Tea (which I’m pretty sure is just British tea, that is tea with milk and sugar). From here we go to church. My home-stay family is Pentecostal, which means church is much more like a Sunday morning concert than a prayer service. While I regret to inform you that I have yet to witness anyone speaking in tongues, everyone sings along and dances to the music (some people, the youth in particular get very into the music, running up and down the isles etc). Suffice it to say although it is a two hour service, it is quite the experience, and is rarely dull. After church everyone returns home and the family has a large noontime meal, complete with all the fixin’s, rice, beef stew, g-nut sauce, matoke, and even (as far as I can tell the only source of fiber in the African diet) a mysterious vegetable known only as “greens”. After lunch people spend the rest of the day at their leisure, often attending weddings or introduction ceremonies (which are lengthy processions in which a man and a woman of an arranged marriage are officially introduced) some times enjoying a cold beer on the shores of Lake Victoria.

This particular Sunday I offered to cook breakfast for my family, both as a chance to show my appreciation for all they have done for me and show them some western style food, as well as a chance for myself to have a little home-style breakfast. I brought home milk to add to the omelets, bacon, and all the tropical fruit I could find at the market. I’ve noticed that fruit is considered a treat, and is normally reserved for Sunday afternoons, in relatively small doses. As a treat, I mixed up a huge fruit salad of pineapple, mango, orange, baby banana (like bananas only smaller, I don’t know if they have them in the states but I’ve never seem them), and kiwi. To my surprise they have never seen nor heard of kiwi, but they all seemed to love it. Next I fried up the bacon and fried some eggs in the grease. I did not worry about how this particularly unhealthy method of cooking would be received as people here have absolutely no concerns about cholesterol or fat, in fact men with bellies are considered healthy (and in truth they probably are generally healthier than those without bellies). I also made some omelets and French toast. All in all I think it was received well. The whole family kept remarking about how long it had been since they had had bacon, which I did not realize was such a luxury commodity (though I confess I did spend my whole week’s food stipend on this meal, but it was definitely worth it). They also devoured the fruit salad. I only hope they saw this as a display of my appreciation and not as an allusion that the food they have provided me has not been sufficiently to my liking.

To address Bradley’s claim that the food here is no good, I would contend that, to the contrary, the food here is quite good, but Ugandan’s have a very different concept of food. Every meal includes some staple, be it rice (strangely, though African rice was domesticated independently on the continent, all the rice seems to be Asian white rice, this is most likely because Asian rice is a much more cost effective cash crop), matoke (which is a rather flavorless paste made of smashed up plantains) cassava (a rather dense chewy tuber), posha (I have no idea what this is but I think it has flour and always come is semi-gelatinous squares), millet (served as a paste which has the color of mud, and the consistency of sand) occasionally Irish potatoes, or sweet potatoes (these taste very similar to the sweet potatoes we are familiar with in the states, but have a slightly denser consistency and are not orange, but are normally white, and sometimes a very light yellow). If you haven’t guess, all the staple foods here are almost entirely without flavor. What makes Ugandan food good is the sauces they put on it, usually beef stew, chicken stew, groundnut sauce (groundnuts are the African term for peanuts, and g-nut stew, I recently learned, is simply ground up peanuts with tomato and onions and a few other ingredients mixed in), and beans (just like Mexican beans!!). These stews if prepared correctly are extremely flavorful and make an otherwise bland staple pretty delicious. However, Africans seem to be fairly unaware that their main source of food is totally flavorless, and it is not uncommon to hear an African comment that they cannot wait until their next matoke (my friend Brendan lamentingly commented that his family had returned home from a wedding this weekend and ecstatically told him that they had brought back a weeks worth of the stuff as leftovers, and so this is all they would be having for the next week and a half or so). Most likely because these staples are such a high calorie commodity, Ugandans also don’t seem to consider food a meal unless it is supplemented with one of these. Just last week Mama took me and my home stay brother Joseph out for some chicken at a local pub. After we had eaten our fill we returned home. To my surprise, Mama pushed a plate of potatoes and beans in front of me and asked why I was not taking supper. Apparently the half a chicken we had eaten at the pub simply didn’t count. I have found that stews in my household are normally reserved for the weekend, and so most meals at home normally consist of beans over rice or potatoes. This I am fine with since the beans here are almost identical to the kind we make at home, sometimes we even have chapatti, which is essentially a doughier version of a tortilla. This makes it seem just like home. So in response to the assertion that the food here is no good, I would say that it is good, if mixed properly (the staples by themselves are quite tasteless), but, there is definitely a lack of variety, (I’ve literally just listed for you everything on the Ugandan diet). But this is true of almost all food traditions arising out of impoverished areas (I’m reminded of Jim Gaffigan’s assertion that all Mexican food is some combination of beans, meat, tortilla, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion).

Saturday, we celebrated Patrick, one of our Swahili teacher’s, birthdays. We had actually bought a cake as a way to show our appreciation to the Swahili teachers, who left their homes and families in Kenya to come teach us for three weeks. However, that week we learned that Patrick did not know when his birthday was. I believe he was born to the Masaai, and they find this celebration rather pointless. Of course this did not sit well with us westerners who hold birthdays as the utmost of important holidays, the day were people give you gifts and you eat cake, and can even cry if you want to. So beneath the “Asante Sana” (Swahili for thank you very much) we added a “Happy Birthday Patrick” and decided that February 23^rd would from now on be Patrick’s birthday. This was about the happiest I have ever seen the man. He explained to us that he was born in a maize field to parents who did not know how to read or write, and so they never gave him a birthday. In fact he did not even know how old he was. He said he would have to check the records for his particular region in Kenya as he is told he was born the same year that they introduced millet to the area. He then said that upon returning to Kenya he would change his passport so that his birthday would read Feb. 23^rd. Though he did not seem to miss having a birthday before-hand, I think the idea that his trip to Kampala can forever be remembered as the time he was given a one, is something he really appreciated.

That’s all from me for now. After three solid weeks of four hours of Swahili a day, this weekend we have our final exams, which are 100% oral. Four hours a day (and three on Saturday) is a lot to have really sink in, and it seems the more I learn the more I want to substitute in Spanish in places I am unsure. So, I need to start studying for this test now. Wish me luck!