Food in Africa or way to be grateful!

The food in Africa was a very interesting experience.

Obviously eating at airports was pretty standard but Mozambique and Sth Sudan had very unique food flavours that unless you have African neighbours you don't get to experience in a Western culture.

Mozambique Food Fare

Breakfast

Cereal is not common. You can buy it in the supermarket. It's expensive though as it's imported from South Africa and there is only long life milk.

Instead bread and sweet tea is the order of the day. No not bread in slices. Cute loaves that are broken in half. It's a good day when you get two (this photo was taken on my last morning in Zimpeto- hence why I have two)
The children eat it plain but we bought margarine from the supermarket which made it alot nicer.
You can get spreads too like jam or marmalade. The bread is actually quite pleasantly salty so I found butter was enough.

They also drink very sweet tea. I loved it.  Way too much sugar but as mostly everything else is sugar free it definitely wasn't too bad a thing.

Bread and butter for breakfast

Lunch and Dinner

I hope you like rice!

Big pot of rice ready for lunch

Rice is the main staple in Mozambique. It is cooked for lunch and dinner and was given out in abundance at Zimpeto.

The toppings do vary slightly but it's generally beans or fish or potato, or  pasta (starch on starch).

 

Fish and potato- I couldn't eat the head!

Rice and beans with Fanta from the Servo



Rice and pasta

Salad is only served once or twice a week. Apparently the secret ingredient to a great salad in Zimpeto is chicken stock!  Salad days are good days!

Me helping to hand out salad

It's a special day if you eat chicken. Chicken is a celebratory food and so we had it for Christmas Dinner  Chicken, chips and rice with salad. YUM! Plus everybody was excited because we got soft drink (a big treat)

Winner winner Chicken dinner!

We also had soft drink again for New Year with sausage on bread. This soft drink was in glass bottles. Oh the number of bottles that broke all over the floor. Oy vey!

We were able to walk to the local fruit and vegetable market. About 15 minutes away. So cool! There were heaps of little stalls selling tomatoes, cucumber, bananas, yellow passionfruit, coconut and my absolute favourite PINEAPPLE! So yummy!

15 minutes in the other direction was the Service Station. A good place to buy whole nut chocolate (hazelnut), soft drink and even a whole punnet of neopolitan ice-cream!

The water was safe to drink from the tap- only on the base though.


There is a western style Supermarket called Shoprite that has everything else food wise. I even bought some steak one night. Was craving meat. .

The day we went to the market to buy souvenirs we had an Italian lunch at a Shopping Centre. Pizza, Pasta, burgers. Was good to eat something Western.


Food and Drink  in South Sudan

Rice is expensive in South Sudan. Thursday was rice day at Iris. An exciting day. I swear one of the best meals I had was rice and beans one Thursday.

The rest of the time...


POSHO! (also called Pap in South Africa and Ugali in Kenya and Tanzania)

Aka maize flour mixed with water and boiled to make a thick paste. It is quite deceptive and looks like mashed potato. I really struggled to eat this. It is so bland and unappetising. The best way I found was to mix the topping really well into it. Otherwise I was eating bananas!




Posho with beef. Lots of sauce not alot of meat

Posho with greens- a little hard to stomach

Posho with Matupa- spinach

 Breakfast was bread and sweet tea again. Or one morning we ate sweet potato. The sweet potato aren't orange. But white. Very interesting.

Sweet tea and sweet potato

Iris was blessed with a well that pumped good clean water. No running water here. Just one communal pump. This was definitely the community gathering place. The kids learnt from an early age how to pump water. It's actually harder then it looks. You need a bit of muscle to get the water to come out of the down pipe.

Jumping for water

We were recommended to buy bottled water as the well water
would have taken awhile to get used to. This is only half my water consumption.
I drank at least 3 bottles a day.

Village kids use the well too

 If the kids want treats they have to grow them themselves. G had grown peanuts and spent a long time with some other kids from her dorm, shelling them and roasting them. Then she'd grind them twice using this flat stone and another stone on top. I got to have a go. Such hard work! The second time the peanut butter would drip off the edge of the stone into a bowl. It was tasty!

Homemade peanut butter

We got to go the market- too far to walk. So you'd travel by boda (motorbike) no helmet! Lots of fish products (very stinky) Apparently they come from Uganda. Plus yellow passionfruit, bananas and pineapple.

They did have some small supermarkets. Was able to buy some noodles, baked beans, pringles (expensive) and soft drink.

I am so grateful for the simple things in life. Even posho! It has taught me to be grateful for what I have and not to waste food.