In the land of fresh produce
Living happily avo after
Did you know that Uganda is an avocado heaven? Well you know now. Giant buttery avocados fresh from the garden every day… dreamy! The food in general has been great here so far - always fresh and super tasty. This week we went to the Wednesday food market in Mbarara with one of the Sisters, who gave us a great lesson on food market haggling - an essential education for us Bazungus. So not only are we in avo-heaven, but a bag of cucumbers only costs 1.20 EUR, and you can get 5 medium pineapples for only 3.50 EUR! The tastiest watermelon for 1 EUR? Yes please! We even learned how to recognize a sweet pineapple just by looking at the skin, and how to tell if a jackfruit is ripe by tapping on it like a drum and praying that it sounds hollow. The variety and quality of the fresh fruit and vegetables at the Rwebikona market was really impressive.
Other nice food we‘ve been having includes groundnut sauce, boiled matoke (type of banana), and banana chips/pommes. Cassava is an interesting one, as it‘s a bit like a Guinness - SUPER filling and a full meal in itself. We finally got to taste posho, which is what is served in schools, and we were pleasantly surprised. It is not at all as boring as we imagined, and it is super filling. We also tasted something called a „cape tomato“, which is the closest thing to a tomato and a pomegranate having a baby.
It‘s a full time job trying to stay clean here. It is so dry and dusty everywhere, as it’s the middle of dry season, and the red dust just sticks to everything. You know it’s bad when nothing makes you happier than getting your hands on a jerrycan full of hot water to wash yourself with. The weather is extremely hot during the day, and in fact some people have told us that it’s rare it gets this hot in this part of Uganda. Usually the temperature is quite stable and rarely goes above 30, but this summer has been a lot hotter and the sun is scarily intense here at the equator. There is also very little grass left, and cows are moving around trying to find something to eat - on some stretches of road there are more cows than cars. So many people here are working in agriculture and I can‘t imagine how hard it is for them working in this heat. We often meet men walking along the roads with their bicycles in the sweltering heat, transporting 5-6 massive bunches of bananas on them. Seeing the hardship of a lot of people‘s lives here really brings you back down to earth.
This week we were mostly busy with our Ngaara School project. We finalized a budget for a new 10,000 liter water tank (coming soon), and created some step-by-step guides for the new accounting process we set up to support the food program. We also got our hands on a cappuccino (first one since we left Swizzles) and made friends with a cat called Nini, who lives at a lodge beside where we are staying. The highlight of the week was probably getting the car insured. What should have been a straight forward event turned into an annoying weeklong saga. At least now we don’t have to worry anymore when we smash through potholes, as the National Insurance Corporation (NIC) will pay out a grand total of 0 EUR to cover the cost of the damage. If we see the inside of a NIC office again in this lifetime, it will be too soon…
