Chakula!

Chakula is the Swahili word for food and since I’ve been in Africa I have had several people ask me about the food here. What do we eat? How do I like it? And so on. At Neema House our morning tea and lunch is provided for us. We have morning tea at 10am when all the babies are napping. On Sunday and Monday mornings we have chai (tea) and mandazi, which are African donuts. They are made out of a simple dough which is then fried briefly in hot oil. Usually we eat them plain, while they are still hot, but sometimes I like to sprinkle them with icing sugar. The tea here is just hot milk with spices in it.

On Wednesday and Friday mornings we have chai and chapatti – a type of fried flat bread that is definitely my new favourite food!

The other days we have chai and peanut butter sandwiches. Then we have lunch at 2pm when all the babies have gone down for their afternoon nap.

For Sunday lunch we eat ugali, a cornmeal mush similar in consistency to very firm mashed potato, and cabbage. The cabbage is fried together with carrots, onions and other vegetables and is delicious. They also cook fish on Sundays, although I don't eat it.

Monday we have one of my favourite meals of the week – rice and beans. I never liked beans all that much at home, but I love them here. They are cooked together with fresh grated coconut and seasonings. The only thing you need to watch out for is the odd rock or small bug in the beans! They dry the beans out on a huge tarpaulin in the front yard so sometimes we get some extra crunch or protein in there once it’s cooked. It bothered me a little at first, but now I just close my eyes, eat and it tastes good!

Beans drying out in the yard.

Tuesday we eat ugali and mboga, which is a green vegetable similar to spinach. After trying unsuccessfully to find out from the cook and nannies what type of mboga it is (mboga simply means vegetable), I looked it up online and they appear to be a type of Collard Greens which are known as “sukuma wiki” in Kenya and are often mistaken as being kale. Either way, it appears to be nutritious and they taste very…. green, for lack of a better word. Tuesday is in no way my favourite meal of the week!

Wednesday is makande day, which is a stew made out of beans and maize. It doesn’t look very appetizing, but tastes good. Once again though, you need to watch out for the rocks and bugs!

Thursday is technically dagaa day. Dagaa are teeny tiny fish that are dried in the sun and then eaten whole – eyes, tails and all. They stink to high heaven, but the babies seem to like them strangely enough. Because none of the volunteers will eat the tiny fish, Dorris usually cooks instead. Usually we have stew or spaghetti, which sometimes I eat and sometimes I don’t, depending on whether or not they put meat in it that day.

Dagaa ready to be cooked.

Vegetable spaghetti

Stew and cornbread - I came all the way to Africa to try cornbread for the first time! It wasn't to my liking unfortunately.

Friday is ugali and chicken day. Usually they cook the chicken in the oven and then serve it with ugali, but as I neither eat chicken, nor work on Fridays I don’t eat this meal. Once or twice Dorris has made a chicken soup with rice and I tried it once when I was there, minus the chunks of chicken, and it was quite nice.

Chicken cooking in the oven.

Chicken and vegetable soup with rice.

Saturday is my favourite meal. They make pilau rice with beef in it (big chunks though so easy to get remove) and a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes and onions. I don’t usually work on Saturdays either, but I almost always go in specially to eat pilau!

So that’s what we eat here at Neema and is probably a good representation of basic Tanzanian food (minus the spaghetti and chicken soup of course). For the most part I like the food here and I especially like eating the main meal in the middle of the day. We provide our own dinner at the volunteer house, but we don’t eat African food – for the most part I’m too tired to cook anything more complicated than some pasta or make a pot full of popcorn!

Other African foods that I’ve had here are fried cassava and roasted maize on the cob (you can buy both those things from street vendors) and chips mayai, which I mentioned in an earlier blog. After Nicole got so sick eating it though, I don’t think I’ll be having it again in a hurry!

All in all, I like the food here. I suppose you can have too much of a good thing, but at the moment I would be happy eating chapatti and rice and beans forever!

xoxo,

-Hannah