Rice for lunch and dinner

Meals in the dinning hall.

Today's lunch: cassava stew (not pictured), beef, beans, rice, and fresh pineapple for dessert.

When it's time for lunch or dinner we get ready by washing our hands, and then make our way to the dinning hall at a toddler's pace. I (Gina) sometimes ask Esther to guess what will be the food for that meal. She has quickly learned that if she answers "rice" she is correct 100% of the time!

We have been here over a month now and I thought I'd be tired of eating rice twice daily, but surprisingly that has not been the case. Of course now and then we get chips (fries) or noodles, but there is always rice as well in those cases. It just isn't a meal unless you have rice. And there is always a sauce available to put on the rice, a person here rarely eats plain rice, so the different sauces give it a variety. 

The good thing is that when you're sick (and yes, its "when", not "if"), there will always be an option to eat plain rice if that's all you can stomach at the time.

A little more than a week ago some students asked Mr. Chuma (the school director) if the cooks could please serve us ugali (thick, dough-like mush made of maize and water) that is commonly eaten by the people of Tanzania. He promised that we'd get it the following monday. Monday came and went and there was no sign of ugali. So Mr. Chuma got some guff for not keeping his promise. That same afternoon we saw him talking to the cook and had her hear from us personally that yes, we certainly wanted ugali for lunch. She was shocked and perhaps a little embarrassed by our request. Come to find out, the teachers eat ugali every day for lunch, just like we, the students, eat rice every day. We get served the rice as a privilege.

So that Tuesday, to our pleasure, we had ugali for lunch, of course rice was faithfully there as an alternate option.