OF FOOD

The Kenyan diet for the most part is very healthy: lots of fresh fruits, and food that is simply cooked with basic herbs and satisfying.  Their staple food is corn or maize as they call it and most families try to grow what what maize they can.  Their fruits are tropical - incredible bananas, mangoes, pineapple, sugar cane as well as sweet potatoes.  They make a dough from the maize that literally looks and tastes like playdough until you flavor it with savory stew or gravy.  There is also rice and beans. Then they eat lots of  Sukuma Wiki (or Kales), a member of the cabbage family - very high in iron.

What we have to struggle with are the prevalence of food and water borne parasites that can cause quite serious illnesses.  The water is never to be consumed from the tap; even ice or a wet glass can make you so sick.  We were advised never eat food on the streets, or anything raw, fruit only that we peel ourselves, no salad, and only vegetables and meat that is cooked until very hot and served hot. 

Our hosts here struggle with understanding this.  They want to feed us their best, and even they would have gone without meat for a long time in order that we can eat meat in their home.  They also feed us large amounts of food and somehow feel pressure to feed us a meal three times a day with meat at two meals.  Even explaining we don't want or need this much food, and explaining our restrictions will not change their pattern of behavior.  So we eat and eat and eat, but we hold ourselves to the restrictions because to get sick could potentially ruin our trip and worse.

They are subsistence farmers and the weather is often not kind.  The maize in the fields now is withered and dried out. It is such a sad sight.  In this kind of dry, many people just simply go hungry.  As one man told us "It is not about finishing what you eat, or what you eat but that you even have something to eat."  As we were thinking about the best thing to give the village for Christmas the pastor thinks feeding them is the best gift.  So there will be bags of maize so each family can have some, to feed them for some weeks is very good, because it means that for a some time they do not have to be hungry and they might even get a little ahead.  This is such a gift to them.

We in America with all our materialism and fancy things,  can never imagine what a gift it is to not be hungry for one month.