Ugandan food: A Carbivore's Dream, An Atkinz Dieter's Nightmare

Ugandans are very proud of their food and have a right to be. Families spend a lot of time cooking the day's meals and you can tell from the finished product. It's all very filling and delicious, I'll definitely be craving g-nuts and Chapatti when I get back to the states. The tricky bit of cooking in Uganda is that refrigeration is not available to the majority of the population. Even to those to whom it is, it is too expensive to be used all the time so it is usually kept at a temperature slightly below room temperature simply to cool drinks.

This means that the foods they prepare are quite limited compared to the western diet, and consist mostly of carbohydrates because they can be stored for a long time. The food we eat is also determined by what is locally available (for example the staples are different in Northern Uganda) and what is in season. In most households, the cooking is done outside on a small camping stove heated by coal or stripped wood.

Their main crops are bananas, matoke (green bananas), coffee, avocado, tomato, onions, peppers, ground nuts, rice, passion fruit, jackfruit (huge fruit that tastes like candy!), mangos, popo (a giant green-ish fruit that's the texture of mango), sugar cane, pumpkin, potato, cassava, cotton, tea, and corn.

Popo fruit

Most of my meals consist of 75% starch and 25% beans or meat (which they call soup). But I became a vegetarian four weeks ago so most of my meals are heavy on the beans. Sometimes there are some vegetables on the side when they're available. Breakfast is a cup of tea with two slices of bread and a non-refridgeratable "medium fat spread" (butter-like thing) called Blue Band. This breakfast is almost ubiquitous throughout Ugandan homes.
One big thing that has been difficult to adjust to is the timing of meals. Like in the states there are three meals throughout the day. Breakfast occurs whenever you wake up, but lunch and dinner are pushed back about two and a half hours from American times. We eat lunch around 2:30 or 3 in my house and dinner occurs around 10 or 11. A saving grace in this is that Ugandans also like to "take tea and bread" around 7 pm so by the time dinner rolls around I'm not completely famished.

Drinks:
AFRICAN TEA- This delicious concoction is like a chai tea late that you can make at home. They simmer water, black tea leaves, cardamom, ginger, cinnamon sticks, and sugar then strain the liquid to make the tea.

BLACK TEA - This is the same as in the US, but they often add some powered ginger spices to add a kick to it. They also tend to pile on the sugar, adding about three spoonfuls to each up.

SODA- The biggest soda here is still Coke, followed closely by Fanta and a drink called Miranda. Mirinda comes is a ton of different colors and fruity flavors, and like most sodas here, it is almost exclusively in a glass bottle. The other local soda is called Stoney (bottled by Coke) and it's a ginger soda. It takes a little funky in my opinion, but it works wonders when you have that traveller's tummy trouble.

COFFEE- Coffee is a big crop here and locally brewed coffee is wonderful. Surprisingly, most Ugandans don't use the locally grown coffee beans, but buy instant coffee at the supermarkets.

ALCOHOL-  The best thing about Ugandan alcohol is how cheap you can buy it. The local beers such as Nile or Tusker can go for about 80 cents to $1.50 max. The local beers are just as good as a classic Budwiser or Corona so I have no problem saving money and going for the cheaper alcohol.





Starch
MOTOKE- In Central Uganda (the region in which I live) the staple food is definitely matoke.
This is prepared by peeling sweet green bananas, mashing them together and steaming them inside a blanket of banana leaves. Here is the finished product.

IRISH POTATOES- This is self explanatory, we have them in the US. I have to say the Uganda version is yummier, though.

POSHO- This is a corn flour steamed into a sort of porridge consistency.

Irish, Posho, Matoke, and rice

MILLET- This is the same thing as posho but instead of corn flour, they use millet flour

RICE ON RICE ON RICE- There is a love affair between Ugandans and rice. It's a constant with every meal.

CHAPATI <3- There is a love affair between me and chipati. This is by far my favorite food I have discovered in Uganda. It's like a greasy, thick tortilla that has small bits of carrots, onions and peppers in it for flavoring.

Cassava- This is a root that is also very starchy. Definitely my least favorite Ugandan food. Whenever I eat it I have to drink three or four glasses of water as well to be comfortable.

YAMS- I know that Things Fall Apart occurred in Nigeria. But the obsession with Yams has spread to the other end of the continent. They are a prominent part of the Ugandan diet as well.

SPAGHETTI- It's still yummy in Uganda. There is only red sauce though, no pesto or alfredo :(

g-nut sauce on matoke

PUMPKIN- I have learned to loooove steamed pumpkin here. I have never eaten any part of pumpkin except for the seeds and the sugar-diluted pumpkin mash in pies, but I now know I've been missing out.

"Soup"

Eating dry food is a trial not to be endured in Uganda. they pour "sauce," in the form of beans, meat or fish broth, or ground-nut sauce on the dry food. Ground-nuts are kind of like peanuts but the sauce is not at all like peanut butter. It's much less thick and in my opinion, much better (but I'm biased because I have zero taste for peanut butter).

Ugandan avocado vs. American avocado vs. egg

Fruits and Vegetables
The vegetable selection here at provided meals is pretty limited. Ugandas cook with onions and tomatoes, but are not fans of eating vegetable by themselves. When we are served vegetable they are usually in the form of fried cabbage, kale, or spinich. But, the fruits and vegetables sold at the market are amazing. The avocados and mangos are double the size of those available in the US!

Snacks
G-nuts
The most popular snacks here are pretty filling and can work as a small meal. My favorites are triangular thin pastries filled with either peas or meat called sumosa. There are also mandazi which are yummy triangular donuts.

Rolex

My favorite of all is something called a rolex. It's a rolled up chipati filled with a scrambled egg white mixed with peppers and onions. Definitely a useful college survival food to know of.

People here joke to Muzungus that the difference in Uganda is that when you are eating meat one night, the animal was probably slaughtered that same morning. From what I have seen so far, this is strongly true. Everything really is as fresh as it can be. On more than one occasion, I have been walking with a Ugandan and they have grabbed a jackfruit or mango from a tree beside the road, and started to eat the fruit!

A Week of Unforgettable Moments -Refugee Camp, Safari, and Rural Homestay

Sorry for the posting delay! We've been crazy busy since we've gotten back form the rural stay. Only ten days left until I have to submit my Independent Study Project (ISP) proposal (ahhhhhhh)! I will be working with the Kampala City Council Authority and the Slum Aid Project on sanitation practices and safe water in the slums of Kampala. This project would be particularly relevant due to the typhoid outbreak currently hitting Kampala. For those of you who don't know, the ISP is what takes up the last seven weeks of my program. We spread out across the country and either do independent research or work in an NGO to write a forty page research paper on our topic of choice. It has to go through both Emory's and SIT's Institutional Review Board and I will be working on that next week, so once again I will be insanely busy. We also leave our homestays and either live in an apartment here in Kampala with other SIT students, or, if we are travelling around Uganda for ISP research, we base ourselves in an apartment there. Oftentimes, students are alone for the entirety of ISP, but I think most of us want to do work within an hour of Kampala so we will get to meet up frequently.

Refugee Camp
On Monday we went to Nakivale refugee camp, near the boarder of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We toured the camp and met with different ethnicities of refugees (Somali's, Congolese, Rwandians, Ethiopians, and Burundese) to hear about what life in a refugee camp was like. Many of them had been in the camp for over ten years. It was especially surprising to hear that seemingly peaceful countries like Ethiopia and Burundi had so many refugees. There were over ten thousand Burundese in Nakivale camp alone and eight camps throughout all of Uganda. The camp had schools, but only primary ones so the children's education ended at seventh grade. The schools were also taught in English and the local Ugandan language so many refugee children could not understand. We met one 22 year old Hutu Rwandan who came to the camp in 1994 as a baby and had not left once in his life. He was invited to return back to his country but so many Hutu's are still afraid to return in fear of resurgent violence and an unfriendly reception.

Now it gets exciting!!!!!!!- Safari
On Tuesday we were able to go on two safaris and spend the night in Queen Elizabeth National Park. We got to the park at around 4 pm and got on a boat around 5 pm for an "evening game drive" in which we rode on a boat and got to see all the animals using the river. We saw plenty of Buffalo, Hippos, Crocks, and even some elephants! I think I took over 100 pictures of Hippos, because they were sitting around every corner.

We slept in a little house in the middle of the park and kept getting woken up by loud foot-stomps and trees rustling. The next morning, we woke up at 4:30 to go on a "morning game drive."  As we were leaving our house, a family of hippos crossed the backyard to go to the watering hole for the morning. There were only about 10 feet away from us! We began our safari around 5 and, admittedly I had a really tough time staying awake before the sun came up around 6, but it was incredible being awake and watching the world wake up. We were able to sit on the roof of our van while we drove around searching for animals. It was surreal riding around on a roof in the middle of the savannah, the wind flipping my hair all around, and the sun peaking up over the horizon. It was one of many moments I've had in the past seven weeks of "I can't believe this is my life."

Rural Homestay

After our safari, we drove to the town of Bwera in the west of Uganda to prepare for our three day rural homestay. We then drove into Kyanzi (pronounced chon-zee) and met our homestay families. SIT had us grouped into two houses to help us cope with the culture shock. Meredith, Krissy and I stayed in a family that had three mom's married to a late husband. We were the "daughters" of one of the oldest sons in the family. Our mother (his wife)'s name was Agnes and she had a three year old daughter Martha who lived at the house, and two older children who lived with their father in a slightly larger town. All together there were 12 people living in the house including us. The home was pretty large in comparison to some of the other homes in the village. Like my current homestay, there were bare brick walls and no ceiling under the tin roof. But the home had no electricity and no plumbing so we lived by candle and cellphone light after 8 pm. There was a pit latrine outside that was essentially a mud hut for going to the bathroom. 

We were focused on learning about the healthcare challenges faced by the rural poor so we visited a traditional birth attendant on the first day. We also visited a rural school, the regional referral health center, and a traditional healer. 

As a going away present, our family made us each a BEAUTIFUL traditional dress.

With the traditional birth attendant 

A third grade classroom in the rural school. 

Mashing ground nuts to make sauce (kind of like peanut butter)

Mommy Agnes cooking lunch

All of our siblings!

Our three Jajas with us in our traditional dresses

Meredith and me with Agnes showing off our fashionable dresses.

All the neighborhood kids would come over to play with us whenever we were home. This was our crew for the week. 

We spent the majority of our time at our home either helping to cook dinner or playing with the neighborhood kids. When it got dark out I would get out my headlamp and put on a shadow-puppet show for the kids. They taught me all the Lusoga words for common animals and the sounds they make here (cows don't go moo, they go mehhhh here?) On the last night a huge group of neighborhood boys sang and did traditional dance for us around the firelight. They sang the East African Anthem in Swahili and the Ugandan national anthem. Again, I had that moment of clarity where it seemed like life had stopped around us while we were in this magical story. I can remember looking up when they sang and seeing the clear, bright stars above us, so undiluted by city lights we could see colored planets among them. Our whole family had gathered around the fire and clapped in a circle while the boys sang and danced. 

Here is the link to the East African Anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RUcwvStL7o

The Ugandan National Anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr2QtUNhwLI