Food!

It’s Saturday morning, around 11 am, and it’s going to be a hot day!  Looks like today will be another relaxed day.  I may head into the Salon with my “host sister.”  She’s getting a weave in her hair, then we may check out the local KFC for lunch, I’ve heard its much different than ones back home.  I hope she’s right, since Hannah and I hit up a KFC this summer and felt so full of grease for the next 12 hours.  But it’s the one real restaurant in this area, it’s kind of out of place, but the people seem to love it. 

                Then, back by popular demand is Saturday night pizza night.  It will be a weekly occurrence now, which is fine with me!  It is so funny to me how the idea of pizza makes everyone go crazy around here.  My students want me to make pizza for them, my teacher wants some, and my family keeps buying the ingredients for everything.  If I ever am stuck with nothing to do, I can always move to the Venda and open a pizza parlor!

                Last night, Joice (the host mom) comes in the door and hands me 3 avocados.  My jaw hit the floor.  I have never, in my entire life, seen or heard of such big avocadoes.  Winter is the season for these (which is May, June, July-ish over here) so most avocadoes are finished for the year.  Joice’s mother, however, has a tree with some still hanging on it.  They are going to go to waste, so she went and grabbed them for me, knowing they are probably my favorite food God has given to us.  Now, they call avocados African butter, since they use it mostly just as a spread on bread, and sometimes chopped up in a salad.  “What do you do with them?” she asked me.  She was searching for something to make for dinner and I could tell she wasn’t ready to spend 2 hours in the kitchen preparing like she normally does.  So I said I often make Guacamole. They stared at me with such funny looks on their faces I had to laugh.  So I explained, and she said, “go ahead.”  So I walk into the kitchen, and start cutting into the massive avocadoes.  Yummy J.  I used what they had, some tomato, fresh lemon juice, onions, salt, some random seasoning that smelled good, and mixed it all together.  I only used 2 avocadoes and it filled an entire glass bowl.  Crazy!  So what was for dinner?  A big bowl of Guac, tons of bread to eat it with, and cheese. (and because it was a different sort of dinner, we were allowed to have juice, too.  Oh how I’ve missed drinking some sort of liquid with my meals!) I’ve had my fill of guacamole for a couple of days! 

                Since I’m on a roll writing about the food, I’ll try and give some more specifics about what I eat out here.  Every day, Cecilia, my cooperating teacher brings me food for lunch.  The school provides their teachers food, but she doesn’t like to eat that, so she brings her own.  Every morning around 9 o clock, in the middle of class, she’ll make us some sort of oatmeal thing.  It’s Wheat Bix (which are just oats stuck together) with hot water and milk poured on them so it turns into oatmeal-like stuff.  Then she puts in banana, yogurt, and some weird black seed and mixes it up.  It looks absolutely disgusting, but doesn’t taste too terribly.  I actually am learning to enjoy it.  At least it’s fairly healthy, right?  Then for lunch, she will bring leftovers from the night before, or a sandwich with some sort of meat on it, nothing too far from what we have back home.  The school provides traditional food, usually fried chicken of some sort, Pap (corn ground to a powder and then cooked in boiling water), and a soup-like mash up of various things.  This is also pretty standard for what we eat at night.  Purple cabbage, squash, salad, cucumbers, and many other fruits and vegetables are part of the meal too.  Around here they also love Acha.  Most of the times its mango Acha, which when I first heard about it I was excited to try it because I love mangos.  It turns out they take hard, green mangoes, cut them up, stick them in some really spicy mixture and let them sit for a week or two.  Then they add some veggies and its ready.  Wow, it’s hot!  And not very kind to my stomach, so I stay away from it most of the time. 

                Now on top of all this, I have been experiencing some new chicken eating concepts.  Saturdays, I see the meat I will be consuming for the week staring at me.  Then it’s the son’s job to cut off the heads and the feet and pluck the feathers.  Then there the chicken sits, all parts, looking at me in the fridge for the rest of the week.  As days go by, parts of the chickens get cut off and we eat them.  Then on Friday, all the rest of the chicken goes in the pot. This week, it was done on Thursday, so for dinner we had chicken neck, feet, heart, and liver.  Meat wasn’t a part of my meal that night J.  It’s also great to hear the family eat chicken.  Since dinners are pretty much silent, I just listen to everything going on.  Every part of the chicken is consumed, everything but the actual bone.  So come time for the cartilage to be eaten, or the chicken feet, the crunching sound is pretty fantastic.  I try and finish most of my food before they get to this point, as I tend to not be so hungry after this.  They are pretty kind though, and don’t question me as to why I don’t eat that part of my chicken J. 

                And liver, I often eat cow liver.  What a fantastic meal! (I am being so sarcastic, but this is what most people think around here.)  I am glad they enjoy it though, it is really great how they waste no part of the animals.  But for me, I take a few bits and that’s good for me. 

                The water situation is fine.  The family keeps some water in the fridge for me, and they drink it too because it tastes better.  I don’t have to worry about water from the tap, I can brush my teeth no problem.  This is SO nice.  At the school, I just stick with my water bottle and don’t mess with that water situation.  Every once in a while, the water out of the tap turns brown, and then you just give it time and it will be clean again.

                So, I’m surviving just fine!  I eat a lot of good food, and a lot of not-so-good food too.  But my stomach has now adjusted and I’m officially eating normal amounts again, probably more than I should!  The biggest frustration is not getting to go out and go for a run or get much exercise.  Walking around the area alone isn’t completely in my comfort zone yet…

                Although last night around 5:30, I did make a solo trip to the top of the mountain (not far from the house) to watch the sunset.  I was sitting in the street, and had some funny looks from people.  I can imagine, though, that if I were them and I saw the only white girl in the entire area sitting on the street with a goat eating on one side and a cow mooing on the other, I would stare and laugh as well J.  But the beauty of the sunset is a little way God helps calm me down and give me strength for the day.  I can watch the sunrise every morning through my window, too.  What a way to wake up!  It’s beautiful.

 Before I go, here is a quick bit from my devos this morning:

                “Seek Me in good times; seek Me in hard times.  You will find Me watching over you all the         time.”

I guess we all have our own ways of feeling that God is watching over us.  I’m definitely a nature-person, and seeing the sunshine beat on my skin every day is an amazing reminder.  What an amazing God we serve!