Fish are Friends, not Food

A week in and Kisumu is still awesome. Over the weekend we went to see Lake Victoria and then met up with a guy from Atlanta for dinner at his house. He was a nice guy and is living in Kisumu for the next four years with his wife while working at a clinic. His wife made quiche. It was nice to muzungu-out for a little while.

On Sunday, my host- mom let me help cook, which is always exciting to me. We were making omena and I had to sort through it. What is omena?

this is omena

oh hai

Omena is a dish of little fish. You see people selling them on the side of the road in huge piles. So, what do you do with a huge cluster of little fish?

I'm a fish with a nose like a sssswwwwoooorrrdddd...

Typically they are stewed in a tomato-y sauce. The other times I have eaten them it wasn’t very good. There’s not much to the fish other than skin and the eye. But the way my host mom made hers was actually quite bearable with minimal thinking about what I was eating.

On Monday the interns divided up into their preferred area. I meet the nutrition staff and talked to Debra, the lady in charge. Right now I am going to be doing simple things like making documents to store their client’s contact information. The nutrition department at KMET makes and sells nutra-flour. It is made of milled soybeans, millet, and peanuts and is used to make a porridge. The porridge itself is a complete meal, with plenty of protein and fats as opposed to just the usual carbs.  After meeting with Debra, I sat with the nutrition staff and sorted through the soy beans. They tried to teach me Luo. It is really freaking hard. Their word for “thank you” has like 7 syllables.

After the soybeans, we bagged some flour for the next day’s trip to Busia. I got a chance to actually try to porridge, and it’s not bad. It’s way better than just straight millet porridge.

Today we visited three schools to drop off the flour and deworm the students. At every school dozens of faces squeezed out the windows to see the weird looking visitor shake all the teacher’s hands. Deworming, while the joke stereotypical thing that people do in Africa, isn’t such a terrible thing; you just give the student a pill to take. It’s very easy actually.

So far so good.