Africa Pt. 1: Food

After a few days back home, I have finally had a chance to start going through all my photos from Africa. This is the first installment of what will be many posts focused on different themes that emerged among the photos I took while there. To recap, Dave and I went on a two week trip to Kenya and Tanzania to visit his sister, Gina, who works in Nairobi interviewing refugees for US visas. We flew into Nairobi, then took a bus to Moshi, Tanzania, where we met up with Gina's boyfriend Luka and went on safari to Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro Crater. Luka runs an amazing outreach program in Moshi, Tanzania called the Salama Center which provides education and other services for orphans and their extended families. You can read more about the work they do at the Orphans International Interns blog. Though this kind of work certainly has it's ups and downs, it was incredibly inspiring to see how much of a positive impact they are having on the lives of these children. We spent two days at the Salama Center, where we mostly played games with the kids. After Moshi, we went to Mombasa, Kenya to relax at the beach and walk around the historic Old Town, then back to Nairobi for our last two days.

This first post focuses on food.  Food is both culturally specific and universal to all humankind, and sharing a meal with someone of a different culture can be a wonderful, intimate and illuminating experience. We were excited to be invited to the home of Luka's sister, Susanne, for a Sunday afternoon meal with their extended family. The budget for the meal was 20,000 Tanzania Shillings, about $15, and that was enough to buy food to feed more than 15 people. All ingredients were purchased on the way to Susanne's house, and everything was prepared from scratch. Preparation took several hours and everybody who was able to help out was expected to do so. I had told Luka earlier that I like to cook, so I was first put in charge of stirring the pots, but this when the kitchen hut filled up with smoke and my eyes started watering, face flushed, I had to switch to grating cabbage. After that I work on making chapatis while Dave entertained the many children who showed up for the food and to see the strange white people who'd come to their neighborhood. When the meal was ready, the adults gathered inside Susanne's house and helped themselves. Among the many amazing dishes, the ones that stood out most to me were the goat and green bananas in coconut sauce and the pilau with vegetables and beef. We ate until we were stuffed and then some.

First a technical note: I've been having some issues with the memory card; when I tried loading the photos onto my computer, the folders containing the photos were oddly renamed. For example, the folder "103SAFAR" was now called "103SABAR", "102MOSHI" became "102MOWHI". What's worse is that two of my folders contained not JPGs and RAW files but a mess of unknown file types with gibberish names. One of the folders is listed as an unknown file type, not a folder, but when I put the card back in the camera I was able to view all of the photos in this particular folder. However, in the folders where the files had the gibberish names on my computer, I was unable to view any of the photos on the camera screen that had previously been there. Obviously this is troubling, especially since the memory card is brand new and I have no idea if this is an issue with the card or the camera (though my guess is the card since I haven't had this issue before.) If anyone has had a similar issue or knows what's going on, I'd be very grateful for any assistance. 

Now for the photos: