Oh The American Things We Do (or “It’s African Good”)
When traveling to a foreign country, there is no doubt you are gong to
be taken our of your comfort zone, experience some sort of culture
shock, and have to learn how to adjust to a maybe more primitive
lifestyle than the one you are used to or a completely different way of
living. In order to stay sane and to keep some feeling of normalcy,
sometimes you may just have to invite a little of your own familiar
culture into the one you are currently residing (keeping in mind of
course that you may have to compromise with a few things if your new
culture doesn’t exactly have the exact same materials as your familiar
culture). Here is a short list of things we have tried out to try to
remind us of the comforts of home. Our new favorite phrase: it’s Africa
good!
1. Our peanut butter cookie experience: There is probably
not a day that goes by that someone doesn’t think about (and
practically drool over) some US food that they miss. One day, we tried
to come up with a way to remedy one of those. Cookies had been the
craving of the moment (there aren’t many sweets here in Uganda) and I
remembered a super easy recipe I know for peanut butter cookies. As
soon as we decided this might actually be a possibility, mouths started
to water and we started to think about what we would need and how we
would get it. Peanut butter, brown sugar, and an egg are the only 3
ingredients and we figured they would be easy enough to find. There
were certainly a fair share of complications (we weren’t sure if we
would be able to find actual brown sugar and had to travel into Kampala
for that – and for regular peanut butter that wasn’t gnut butter or
sim-sim paste for that matter; we didn’t have access to a normal
working stove and since you can’t bake cookies over coals, we decided
on cookie dough instead; since there wasn’t a mixer or even a wooden
spoon, we had to mix the (rather tough) ingredients with a metal
serving spoon in a rather strange-shaped serving bowl after eye-balling
all the ingredient measurements because there was no measuring cup).
After using natural (barely sweetened) peanut butter, brown sugar that
was definitely way more molasses than sugar, and a brown egg with a
white yolk, we concluded that this rather interesting dog-food looking
cookie dough lump was Africa good and we managed to finish off the
plate (with the help of some African guests of the hotel who were
served some with dinner and put huge chunks on their plate without
knowing what it was before we were able to stop them).
2.
American dessert attempt no. 2: So the cookie dough experience was
decent but we decided we needed a little more guaranteed success. So
one of the girls came up with the absolutely brilliant idea of making
coke floats our of some ice cream cups we found at a local shopping
mart between our guest house and the church we go to everyday. I’m
pretty sure we can all agree that that was probably the most delicious
thing we’ve had in a month!
leaders, both Braedon and Audrey, went to Lira to be with our other
team for a bit. Our team used our time by ourselves as an opportunity
to grow closer to each other and stronger together and really bond. One
creative outlet: games! Every day this week, our ministry work has been
to go door-to-door through an apartment complex (called Bugolobi flats)
across from the church. Because we get done at 4 and don’t eat until 8,
we usually have the whole afternoon to ourselves. So Friday, we decided to teach and play a bunch of games with each other. We started out with a little Mafia then moved outside to play the Fishbowl game until dinner, took a break long enough to eat and have a little team time, then went right back outside and played Sardines for the rest of the night. We even taught some of our games to some of our African friends and they enjoyed playing along with us too. It was truly a great bonding experience for us!
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