Eating

Don’t worry, family and friends, I am still eating a lot of food here:

The first month of being here, our host families cooked for us. We ate mostly traditional food. The main foods of Basotho consist of papa and morojo. Papa is corn/maize ground up and heated up slowly with water. Morojo is a cabbage/chard (leafy green vegetable) heated up with onions and salt/herbs. I’m not really sure what vegetable morojo is – they call it spinach, but it’s definitely not spinach. They also made beets with chutney sauce and carrots with mayonnaise – both are pretty good. Since the Peace Corps staff explains to the families that we need protein I had chicken almost every day, which is not common for poor families, but they made a curry stew – it was amazing.

My host family also tried to make “American food” sometimes for breakfast and lunch. For breakfast, I would get cereal and milk, but for some reason having to do with sanitation and pasteurizing, they think that the milk should be boiled. It took a while for me to convince them that I like it cold. For pack lunches that I took to class, my host family mostly made sandwiches. The Peace Corps tells families that Americans like peanut butter sandwiches and cheese…so I got a sandwich with both peanut butter and cheese….kind of weird, but not bad.

We recently started cooking for ourselves. We are equipped with a gas tank, a small gas stove, and a few pots and pans. The stores in the main towns actually have a lot of really good options, but the hardest part is figuring out how to store food and what to buy that won‘t go bad in a week or 2. I’ve been pretty lazy – I made spaghetti one night, I’ve made Ramen noodles, and a lot of egg sandwiches. The village that I’m living in for training has a school for deaf children and they sell eggs to raise funds for their school. Eggs cost 1 rand each, which is about 10 cents, so eggs are becoming a new food group for me. Rice, pasta, fruits, and vegetable are also pretty easy to get so maybe I will become more adventurous with food once I get settled in more.

Grocery store chain called “Fruits and Veg” in Maseru, Lesotho.