Picky about Protein part i

Whenever someone is about to tell me they live in Area 23, they preface it with, “Oh you won’t know where it is,” noting with their eyes the details of my affluence—glasses, shoes, car and all other obvious evidences of muzungu status.

I assure them of course I know where it is, like I drive the half hour on pitted dust roads (that’s Brit speak and I like it; roads are either dust or tarred, not dirt or paved) through high density villages all the time. Or every week, as Sister L and Sister F do for church. Sometimes Sister F will miss because she doesn’t have transport fare—400 kwacha round trip. It’s only 30 K to go to the first transfer, but 100 back and there’s one other 100 K transfer (and the 20 minute walk) to get to the church building from her house.

But I’m getting to know Kawali and Area 23 a little better after making an official Relief Society trip to Sister L’s home. Zione and I (second and first counselors respectively in our Relief Society) were on the errand of angels; President Ntholowa had asked us to fill a food order for Sister L. There was enough fast offering money to pay her 2000 K rent (2000 K=about 14 dollars) and 2000 K for food.

Bumping and lurching over potholes and swerving to miss the folks on bikes and aggressive combi drivers, we pulled up to the main T intersection. It was almost late afternoon, and the sun was hot, but I was grateful it wasn’t raining; I don’t think I could have managed the drive had the roads been slippery. Directly ahead of us was the market and lining the street in either direction were the stores, tin roofed square cement jobs stacked with a handful of simple goods behind floor-to-ceiling metal gates inside.

We’d been given the green light to get half a bag of maize, 500 ml cooking oil, two packets soap, a packet of salt, and a packet of sugar. When I had mentioned this to Sister L on Sunday and asked if there was anything else she might need, she had asked if she might possibly also get beans or carpenter fish—some kind of protein.

Zione and Sister L led the way into the market, looking for a good deal on maize flour. The ragged stalls providing shelter from the sun were full of women—old toothless ones and younger ones with babies, chatting and braiding hair, or bored and sullen, or just quiet and waiting for a customer. I keep twisting Finn back and forth to keep the most bold of the interested hands from touching him. Everyone likes a little personal space, you know? Wherever we walk together, people are calling out “muzungu!” and “hello mama” and “oh, mwana!” (child). One man leaps up from the stack of bagged cement powder he’s reclining on and gets in my face with a tirade that L translates a little embarrassedly: “He says he wants to be your maid.” Right. Talk about embarrassed. Noting the giant smiles and laughing as we pass through, Zione tells me (and I can’t tell if she intends the irony and is trying to be kind, or if she really thinks this), “Muzungus make people so happy!”

We walk in a line, stepping carefully down the “aisle” over the ubiquitous shreds of plastic that seem to be the national flower of undeveloped countries. Zione and Sister L are eyeing every stall we pass, while I watch the ground to keep my footing and avoid the smears of rotten lemon or avocado, and other suspicious moist spots in the hard-packed lumpy dirt.

No maize flour to be found. We’ll have to try looking in the stores. But my two sisters ahead of me have found a woman selling beans for the right price—a cupped handful’s worth for 50 K. They fill a small bag, and then a grocery size bag with firm tomatoes. For the branch’s record keeping, we’re supposed to make sure we get receipts for everything, but of course there are no cash registers spitting tongues of paper beside these careful mounds of veggies and grass baskets of beans. They ask for the woman to sign a paper as a receipt; she won’t or can’t, so Zione just writes her name beside the list she’s carrying around: tomatoes 100 K Mrs. Girety; beans 200 K Mrs. Girety.

I’m not sure what the price for flesh protein is (Mohammad has told me it’s jumped steeply in the past two years), but I’m acutely aware of it’s smell and I try to hold my face in neutral as we walk back through to get to the stores. I hate that these sellers know I’m not looking at their goods to buy. They don’t even attempt a pitch; two goats disassembled and piled in parts, their heads arranged to the side and cloudy eyes open—I’m not their market, and they know it. I don’t know why that bugs me. I’d like to be less predictable in my preferences maybe.

At any rate, I think I would have surprised Andy and the missionaries that evening when we were gathered around our own table, if they knew about the extra protein they were eating in their chicken soup.

It’s surprisingly hard to find whole grains here, but I had found some 500 g bags of pearled wheat at Shoprite. My plan was to throw it in the soup, though ordinarily I would have thrown it out once I noticed the little black bugs floating to the surface as I rinsed it in the pot. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it after shopping for L’s food order just earlier in the afternoon. Instead I rinsed and rinsed until no more bugs floated out three times in a row, then I cooked it in the soup and no one was the wiser.

Except me, I feel wiser.



ps: any food themed post is enough reason for me to put up these pics of Finn, who is serious about eating. "By his own," thank you very much.