Host Family!

While here in Kenya, I lived with a host family.   When the organization I was working for asked me what kind of family I wanted to live with, I told them a pretty well-off family.  I was glad when I was placed with my family.  Many of the other interns I was with thought they were super tough and chose to live in a tin shack more "traditional" housing arrangement and completely regretted it within a week of being in Kenya.  One of the interns begrudgingly came to love her cockroach infested room.  Her room had a window facing a garbage dump (Mombasa obviously does not have zoning laws) and since windows here do not have screens the roaches flew in from there to use her room as a nesting and resting area after spending a hard day flying around the garbage dump scrounging for food.  On several occasions when I met up with her, she had a very exhausted look about her face.  After asking if she was ok, her response would be, "The sound of the roaches flying around kept me up all night!"  After about a month, the cockroaches even had about 50 babies, which she became slightly attached to - her response after my organization volunteered to fumigate her house was "NOOOOOO!!!  They just had BABIES!!!!".  

My awesome host dad, Kenn, posing with his 2 month year old daughter, Talia.  He is from Kisumu and went to college in India and the UK.  He is self-employed in construction and involved in various other projects.  We bonded over the many football matches we went together.

My beautiful host mother, Maureen, posing with her daughter.  She is also an educated professional.  She used to be a pharmacist, but now she works as a pharmaceutical sales rep.  She kept a very organized, well decorated, and clean house.  

Kenn's mother.  She is 76 years-old and lives 5 minutes from Barack Obama's grandmother's house in the outskirts of Kisumu.  I had many interesting conversations with her.  Our typical conversations were something like, "How do you plow your fields in Chicago?" she would ask.  Which I would respond by saying, "We don't plow our fields in Chicago.  We go to supermarkets to get our food."  Followed by a puzzling look on her face and long periods of awkward silence.  

This is our house help, Felicia.  She is a friend of the family's that came to help after Maureen became pregnant.  She just graduated high school and she is working for the family to save money to go to college.  She became like an older sister to me.  Her favorite movie is the recorded live-action play version of "Tyler Perry's Big Happy Family" (it was recently made into a movie starring Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice Guy).  Here is the link on Imdb.com:  play version - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1647476/; movie version - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787759/).  As you can see by the ratings, its an awful awful movie.  We watched this movie as we ate just about every night for a month straight (and sadly, since I was so slow at eating my food with my hands, it took me the entire movie to eat my meal).  Felicia liked to say the actors' lines and sing the songs along with the movie.  She knew the entire movie line by line and after about 2 weeks of watching it every night, I bitterly did too.  My host father watched 2 minutes of the movie once before he had to leave because he couldn't stand it anymore.

 Family photo...everybody says I have my mothers eyes.   

Kenyan Food!

My typical dinner, sukuma with ugali.  Sukuma is kale leaves cooked in grease until it becomes soggy and almost liquid like.  I had this or some variation of it about 4 nights a week.  I have never told my host family this (they will know now since I will post this on Facebook and they are my Facebook friends), but I thought this was probably the most disgusting food in the world.  While the house help made the best sukuma I ever tasted, it was still disgusting.  I would think something that had so many spices cooked into it would taste better.  A month into my visit in Kenya, I was gagging as I washed it down my throat with huge gulps of water.  But I do eat massive amounts of this as it helps A LOT with going to the bathroom (I am late to work every day the day after we have sukuma as bathroom time usually heads to overtime).  I learned from several bad experiences that I would rather have massive diarrhea than constipation so I made sure to eat all of my sukuma everyday (while it is disgusting to talk about poo, it's a huge deal here and very openly discussed among the interns, which are all female besides me).

I can't say ugali, the white bread like food, was much better.  It was basically ground corn meal boiled in hot water until it becomes starchy and sticky.  It has no taste and is also very disgusting.  The ugali is used to scoop up the sukuma to eat by hand.

Similar meal, different night, only with scrambled eggs this time.  Because protein is pretty expensive in comparison to sukuma, protein is rarely served here.  Fruits are even more expensive so that is even rarer.  But to put it into perspective, a bag of sukuma that feeds all of us (4 adults and 1 baby) costs maybe $0.80, beef is usually around $1.50 for a pound or so and eggs are usually $0.12 each.

On a side note, I had to eat just about every meal with my hands.  I was terrible at it.  I could never efficiently scoop up the food so it would take me several hours to eat one meal.  Eating with your hands is more challenging than I thought it would be.

Cabbage, scrambled eggs and ugali...much better than sukuma and ugali.

My favorite meal!  Pilau (rice flavored with different spices with meat and potatoes, mmmm...mmmm) with beans and mchicha (greans).  This entire meal cost about 90 cents.  I had this almost everyday for lunch at a local restaurant that did not even have running water.  I always thought I had a pretty weak stomach, but after eating at this place just about everyday and never getting slightly sick once, I think I have an extremely strong stomach as several of my fellow interns did become really sick with food poisoning after eating here.

The food in this picture and the picture below is classified as Swahili food rather than normal African food.  Normal African food is Sukuma and Ugali.  Every country in Sub-Saharan Africa has some variation of Sukuma and Ugali...unfortunately.  Swahili food is really good.  It has a heavy influence from the Arabs and Indians that used Mombasa as a trading post and has acquired an African influence to develop into something very tasty.  It is unique to the Tanzanian and Kenyan coast lines.

Chicken Biryani!  My second favorite food here.  It is chicken in a special curry sauce...mmmmm.  The tomatoes on the side are a dish called kachumbari, a type of a very delicious African coleslaw made out of onions, tomatoes, and cabbage.  I have the recipe and I hope to make it at home when I return back to the US.