Ugali & Chapatis

This week is Regional Week at FPO, which means that the bulk of our session time is spent within our regions. This gives us a chance to learn more about our specific situations as well as about how the general principles we've been taught are applied within our specific regions. As part of our regional time we (Central Eastern Southern Africa) went to our Richmond Associate's house tonight to help prepare and eat an African meal (our Associate and his wife pictured at right).

Granted most of the work was done by our associate's wife; however, we did participate. Emily, Kelly and I cut up mangos, bananas, papaya and pineapple for a tropical fruit salad while the Garvins prepared the greens. We all took part in the making of chapatis (chi-PAH-tees), which are kinda like tortillas cooked in oil. Linda made the batter, but we took the batter in balls, made them into snakes (as you may notice by my mastery of high-level culinary vocabulary, I'm not the most experienced cook), rolled the snakes up and then flattened them out into circles before frying them in skillets. The real workout came in making the ugali (oo-GAH-li), which is just corn meal mixed with a little water. The thing is, that stuff is thick as all get out (get out, by the way, being amongst the thickest substances known to man) and so it's about impossible to mix. Apparently if you do it right you mix it for 15-20 minutes, which means that African women must be dang strong because my arms were dying after 2 minutes.

The meal itself consisted of some kinda African chili (in the sense that it was meat with sauce, not that it tasted remotely like chili), rice, beans cooked in coconut milk, greens, ugali and chapatis. We ate it true African style, which meant the women served the men first and then ate on the floor in the other room while we dined at the table. It also meant that we ate with just our hands. That's where the chapatis and the ugali come in handy. The proper way to eat the ugali is to roll it up in a ball and then make an impression with your thumb, kind of an edible spoon if you will, and then use it to scoop up the rest of your meal. The chapati is used in like fashion except for the fact that, being a fried tortilla, you don't make it into a spoon.

The fruit salad served as dessert, and it was great. I can't wait to get my hands on some of that fresh tropical fruit over there. Oh man. And after "dessert" we all had chai and sat around and talked for a while. The meal was great, which provides some hope for future culinary options, and we certainly enjoyed making it.