Lessons in cooking, and life

One benefit of being almost alone in the district this week (it's just the Clarks and me) is that I've spent a lot of time with Ugandan friends. Yesterday, my good friend Vincent had me over to his house for dinner, and to teach me about local cooking. So when I arrived at his house at 6:15, I stepped into the kitchen and started helping out.

Now, kitchen is a relative term. This kitchen, and almost all kitchens in this district, is a small, free-standing structure made of mud packed onto a frame of wood and reeds, with a thatched roof and packed dirt floor. One the ground is a wood fire with three stones around it, which support pots and pans over the fire. There is no chimney. Where does the smoke go, you ask? Into my eyes. And lungs. Ok, most of it escapes through holes in the roof and through the door, but my eyes were burning the whole time, and I woke up this morning smelling strongly of wood smoke. The kitchen counter is outside - a piece of wire mesh suspended between four small poles, where food is placed to keep it clean and dry. There is one knife in this kitchen, and no cutting board; everything is cut while in the hand, pulling the blade back toward your thumb.

I arrived while the sombe was in progress, one of my favorite Ugandan dishes, made from cassava leaves. Vincent walked me through the process of making it, and I was glad to learn, and hope to give it a shot on my own sometime soon. Soon after I got there, Vincent's sister-in-law walked over and just started laughing at us. The sight of two young men cooking is so unusual that she couldn't contain herself. In American culture, it is common for women to be the primary cooks, but here, it seems almost unheard of, and certainly comical, for grown men, and especially married men, to cook. This led me to give me to give Vincent a lesson in American culture: in America, a lot of young men learn to cook, primarily to impress women.

One aspect of food preparation here that didn't immediately occur to me is that dishes are prepared serially. That is, first we cooked the sombe, then we cooked some vegetables, then we cooked the rice, then we cooked the g-nuts. All of this after Vincent and already steamed bananas and cooked cabbage, and prior to that, the firewood had to be collected and split, and the fire started. But the time invested is even more than that makes it seem, as the sombe has to be ground by hand, the rice has to be hulled with a mortar and pestle and have the hulls removed (which took over an hour), an I spent about 30 minutes pounding g-nuts, also with a mortar and pestle. Combine all of these activities, even with several nieces and nephews helping out, and we didn't eat until after 9. It was a great dinner, spent with good friends. I sat next to Aliganyila, to whom a previous post was dedicated, and had a great time laughing with Vincent.

The evening made me think about how different my experience of something as basic as food preparation has been. Yesterday, I almost cut my fingers off several times, while Vincent barely even has to look at what he's cutting in his hand. I buried my eyes in my arm when they filled with smoke, while Vincent hardly flinched. I felt like everything took a long time, and, well, Vincent did too, but he is used to cooking one dish at a time, and people here don't rush like we Americans do.

The smoke, the dirt, the arms tired from grinding, the heat, blowing on the fire, the darkness, the laughter, the silence, time passing - a meal. An experience of life. Simple, unremarkable, everyday life. The mundane. The activities that fill up days and years, the necessary things, the very fabric of experience for so many people here, and all over the world. I was glad to be there for it.