Basic Necessities: Food

At six o’clock in the morning, Sir and I are sound asleep in our rough-hewn king-sized bed, completely covered by a canopy of mosquito netting.

Cock-a-doodle-dooooooooooooooooo!

What. Was. That?!

Sir goes to investigate, and tied to the back of the kitchen door there is a wiry bird.

He climbs back into bed. “It’s our lunch,” he says wryly.

Sure enough, when Ababba comes into work that day, we hear the usual clamor and bustle in the kitchen. And then a short while later, the sound of a panicked squawking reaches our ears accompanied by the bang of its body against the plastic bowl.

Squaaaaaaaawk squawk squawk squawk squawk squawk squawk squawk squawk squawk Squaaaaaaaawk

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Then silence.

A few minutes later, Ababba is calmy plucking feathers from her fresh kill, and there is indeed a plate of chicken at lunch, except it’s so wiry and tough it might as well be meat-flavored chewing gum.

And I thought the French were hands-on with their beasts.

I cannot say that Somaliland was our favorite place as far as food was concerned. I mean there was always a small plate of fresh salad topped with creamy dressing (tomatoes, lettuce, sometimes canned vegetables and a limited variety of other things spread out on a platter for our appetizer). And there was always goat. 

Ababba whipped the place into shape the year before we arrived. The former team all contracted food poisoning from the greasy male cook they had hired so they decided it was time to find someone new. When Ababba saw the state of affairs, she kicked everyone out and scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom for an entire day. The next day she presented the best she had to offer to the tune of enthusiastic ooh’s and aah’s from the whole team. She spoke little English and almost exclusively Amharic, but one of the team members was Ethiopian-American so he served as spokesperson.

The luxury of a cook, however, meant that the team members wouldn’t be spending the entire day picking the rocks out of rice instead of serving the needy like we were there to do.

We probably fared better in Djibouti where the one large supermarket boasted many fine French cheeses and much more of the delicacies one would find in a first world country. Such a strange place, Djibouti. It was a mix of first and third world with absolutely no meeting point in the middle.

When we would exit the store, the crowds of beggars would surround us and we made the mistake at first of buying extra to give to them. But that only ended in fights breaking out amongst themselves and some small danger to us. So we started to say no.

In Djibouti we were alone. We were supposed to be setting up camp for a future team to come; we were processing the extensive paperwork with the government to set up charitable operations and scouting out what needed to be done. But there was none of that simplicity and ease we found in our close-knit team in Somaliland.

There may have been all the modern delicacies and conveniences where food was concerned, but it doesn’t fill up loneliness.

In Nairobi we stayed with a family for four months, so we shared in their food and their life. They had a cook who would bring us the country’s standard fare in the small den while we watched a Spanish soap opera subtitled in English. It was ugali and sukuma wiki. Ugali is a white corn cake that has little taste of its own, but that you mold into a sort of a spoon to scoop up the food drenched in sauce. For the meat, we most often ate gizzards.

Sukuma wiki means “push the week.” It’s a tomatoey mix of collard greens and kale with a delicious sauce. It was the cheapest thing you could make, so if you were short on funds until payday, you just “pushed the week” with this dish to keep food on the table until payday.

Of course, Nairobi is cosmopolitan (compared to Somaliland), and there was a mall called “The Sarit Center” not far from where we were staying. There we had the best coffee and scone I’ve ever had in my life. (This was before I was gluten-free). I would contrive reasons to head to that mall just for breakfast. 

There was one rather modern sandwich-coffee shop in the center of town, and we often found ourselves at the YMCA where I ate more gizzards than I ever thought possible. Once we ate at a restaurant a ways out where you could walk on a swinging bridge in the trees far above the wild animals below.

But it was Hargeisa, Somaliland that I remember most. I remember the sweet chai tea and the juicy ground meat samosas we ate at the hospital. I remember going to the market on Thursdays because Friday was the day of prayer (the weekend) and our cook did not work on that day.

There were so many women sitting on a small blanket or tarp. Most of them had no more than a handful of things to sell – a half of a cabbage, 5 onions, 10 small tomatoes, a chili pepper and a few potatoes.

One sold spices, one sewed our cloth into the traditional potato sack dresses we needed to wear. The men would hack away at their freshly-butchered goats, completely covered in flies, and they would wipe the intestines off their knives on to the tarp over their heads.

Eggs were very difficult to find and my friend and I actually got into a fight over sharing the eggs. We laugh about it now, but we were seriously mad at each other at the time. It was civil unrest amongst the Americans in Africa.

In the orphanage, the children come for their porridge and sit on the ground to eat it. It’s a mix of corn and other grains that are ladled onto a flat plate, and this is their meal. They place their fingers into the dish and bring the porridge up to their mouths to lick off their fingers.

Sometimes they have bread.

I enter the dark room that is the nursery and I see the babies in their cribs.  Many of them have bottles propped up on the side of their crib that they are supposed to drink from by themselves. Some are just too weak.

I take Kadra in my arms. She has dysentery and her diaper is dirty. I wash her and change her into something clean – her body is so small and light.  And then I smile at her in my arms and coax her to drink from the bottle I am holding. With this consistent attention, I am happy to see her fatten up before my eyes and start to smile at me.

And when I return from Kenya 7 months later, I find out she is dead.

Food. Something to talk about, share and pin, something to anticipate, to elaborate, even something to spurn …

Yet elsewhere it is in short supply.

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