Food.

As you may know, food is very important to me . . . and over the past couple of years I’ve become a bit particular about what I eat. While I definitely have not been eating the spinach salads (with gorgonzola, pears, and candied walnuts) that I would like to eat, the food here hasn’t been that bad. That being said, I really do not like xima (a cornmeal based porridge/dough thing, which is way different than the stuff we ate in Zambia). My family seems to think that xima is a treat for me, when I would really just rather eat rice. Every time I eat it I ration my juice so that I can have a sip after every bite. I haven’t gotten far enough in either my bravery or language skills to convey this message without hurting anyone’s feelings.

We eat a ton of carbs here (and I only eat half of what even the 1 year old eats). Lots of rice, xima, noodles, bread, and potatoes. My family knows that I like fruit (I now get juice at least 2 times a day and eat 2-3 apples/bananas a day), but doesn’t quite understand that I would like more than carrot shavings in my pasta. The carrot shavings have grown substantially since I said I liked them, but are still too small for my liking.

However, today was a wonderful day because I got peanut butter with breakfast. Not having peanut butter was one of my big concerns about life in Africa (besides the whole health and language thing). I hadn’t quite gotten to the point of asking for it (PC gives the families a fair amount to feed the volunteers, but I’m still not sure of how expensive certain things are) and my family had not offered peanut butter yet. Minha mae brought back loaves of bread from Swaziland and I have been eating bread with butter and jam for breakfast, but still hadn’t seen peanut butter. Today, minha mae brought out the peanut butter and I had a pb&j for breakfast and a peanut butter and banana sandwich for lunch (along with my pasta). It was basically heaven.

So, now that I no longer need a steady supply of peanut butter care packages, I’d love to get letters  :)