Mmmmmmmmmmmm Potatoes

After 2.5 weeks, patterns are starting to emerge.  For anyone who followed our Vietnam adventures, you are probably not surprised to learn that food has been central to our routine and an avenue to explore our new hood.  

To start the list, since we are in Rwanda, is the local Rwandan fare.  There isn’t a ton of diversity in the day-to-day food, except for in the carbohydrates.  Most meals are chocked full of them, in many different forms.  When out at the PIH sites, we start our day with bread brought in from Kigali and frozen on site until needed.  The bread is accompanied with all kinds of delish relishes from Rwanda – peanut butter, honey, strawberry jam.  On special days, the house manager Sabine makes yummy crepes and omelets to spice things up – omelets seeming to be a consistent quick meal out or at home and not only for breakfast.

Lunches and dinners at site always come with choices of starch – today was rice and pasta for lunch and rice and French fries for dinner.  These are always served with some type of saucy goodness to smother the carb with – tomato soup with peas and eggplant, meat sauce, or my favorite, Isombe – ground cassava leaves with nuts.  Pretty typical in local restaurants are the lunch buffets, which for $2-5 you get a plate piled as high as you can get the carbs to fit.  Here you get more carb options – the most diverse buffet had ugali (local mashed maize), two types of rice, pasta, French fries, mashed cassava, and matoke – by far my favorite carb, plantains stewed in tomatoes.  The buffets will also include some sides – isombe, beans, tomato gravy and then you are given one (maybe two if you're lucky) small pieces of meat.  

Part of the reason that the diet is so carb heavy is that everything else is quite expensive.  Even when we cook at home, I find that we don’t use a ton of veggies – a lot of carrots (can get a bunch from a lady down the street for 13 cents), some green peppers, tomatoes.  Nathan cooked greens (maybe collards) one night that were really good; we have had both broccoli and cauliflower.  But they are pricey.  We are getting a better grasp of what you can get and what you can get cheap.  Nathan just made a trip to the market while I am at the project site, and I can’t wait to see what he has found!

In such a carb heavy diet, one might worry for our health.  I do sometimes feel fluffy – we have joined the local gym to try and nip that in the bud – but overall, I feel really healthy.  The food, while carb heavy, is all local and rarely fried (potatoes the exception).  We are taking multivitamins that we brought from the US and Nathan is encouraging me to eat the local tiny bananas and drink juice.  I want to make passion fruit a more normal part of my diet.  And there are also the giant and practically free avocados.

So we are still figuring out the food, but the one thing I have figured out… I LOVE the coffee.  Rwandan coffee seriously is the best in the world, and luckily that is readily available and worth every penny.