Catering

The Challenge: Create Christmas season food for a group of visiting Canadians and a few other expats who would be missing familiar traditions in a place where only basic ingredients are available.

The Response: Is no problem! All we have to do is:

1. Find a turkey. Ugandans don’t eat turkey, and you can pay over $100 for a turkey from stores in Kampala, so this is was not easy. However we managed to work it out. We contacted the Farm Manager at Kibaale Community Centre (a former student of mine when I taught here in 1996.) He found us one, and almost as importantly, he arranged to have it slaughtered, cleaned and plucked for us, so we didn’t have to deal with all that. It was very small and quite tough, so we supplemented it with a roasted chicken as well to make sure there was enough to go around.

2. Gather special treats. Over several trips to Kampala over the last few weeks we stockpiled items that are unavailable in Masaka to ensure that we had sprinkles for the cookies, cheese for the cheese platter on Christmas Eve and bacon for Christmas morning brunch. On my recent trip to South Africa, I also picked up some exotic African appetizers to share on Christmas Eve—roasted macadamia and cashew nuts and cans of zebra and wildebeest pate.

3. Bake up a storm. Megan has been VERY busy over the last little while making gingerbread men, molasses cookies, chocolate mocha pretzels and many other delicious baked goodies. I contributed a tray of Nanaimo bars and some butter tarts.(Interestingly, I learned through my internet recipe search that both of these are uniquely Canadian treats...who knew?)

4. Adapt where necessary. Since we are in the tropics we were able to add a few things to our menu that we wouldn’t be able to enjoy at home. We served freshly squeezed passion fruit juice for Christmas dinner, barbecued burgers on Christmas Eve and had fruit salad that featured mangoes from the trees on our property.

5. Be willing to spend lots of time in the kitchen. Prepared food doesn’t exist to any great degree here, so we had to make most things from scratch and without the benefit of food processors. We chopped all the ingredients for fresh salsa and guacamole and had to form the hamburger buns and patties by hand. Lots of cutting, slicing, kneading, carving and stirring, let me tell you!

Yes, it’s been a lot of work, but it has been fun to put it all together. It was a delicious feast and it felt almost like home on this first Christmas I’ve spent away. I’ve got good friends here and it was great to have visitors to help us celebrate. Good thing we’re heading on a safari next week...we can let others do the cooking for a few days! Phew!

Festivities

Christmas Day is apparently in six days, but I have to keep looking at the calendar in order to convince myself of this reality; it just doesn’t feel like “Christmas” around here and I’ve been thinking about why that is. Sadly, I’ve realized that many of the things I associate with preparing for the season have a distinctly “commercial” element to them—buying coffee in a red cup; seeing decorations appear in malls, checking off items from a shopping list; buying new outfits for various parties and so on. Don’t get me wrong—I love these things!

We really do make things complicated, though. Magazine covers offer “200 Gift Ideas” or “150 Ways to Simplify the Holidays” or “75 Festive Recipes.” We go to parties, attend special concerts, brave crowded parking lots and make plans to travel great distances through inclement weather. This is how we celebrate. And since I find myself somewhere that does very little of this, I am finding it hard to believe that the season is here.

I do hear the occasional Christmas song playing on the workers’ radios outside my door each day; people are starting to head from the cities to their villages where they will spend time with their extended families; the street hawkers in Kampala are trying to sell artificial Christmas trees to people stuck in traffic; some businesses have put up decorations and the Kampala Amateur Dramatic Society (made up of expatriates) is putting on its annual Christmas pantomime. There is evidence that it is a special time of year. There just isn’t the hype that I am used to and it is sort of refreshing.

We are planning to re-create much of what we associate with Christmas, but we will do several things a little differently. For example, we’ve ordered a turkey from “our guy” in the village, but we really had to emphasize to him that we didn’t want to butcher it, clean it and pluck it ourselves. Similarly, we have done a fair bit of baking, but we’ve had to adapt a few of the ingredients to what is available here. On the plus side, we can put poinsettias on the table as decoration, but we can just pick them from the bushes that grow here naturally. Another contrast is that the workers at the project site are having their staff Christmas party later today, but we’re not going to some hotel ballroom to enjoy a buffet dinner--they’re killing a bull right here and cooking it up to share. Good times!

In many ways, I’m glad the season feels so different here. It helps me not to feel too sad that I can’t be with my family and friends at a time of year when spending time with loved ones is such a big part of the celebration. Be that as it may, we have visitors from Canada here at the moment, we’ve stockpiled lots of delicious goodies, we’re having a barbecue on Christmas Eve (something this Canadian has never done!) and it’s sunny and warm. It’s all good!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Domesticity

The construction of the on-site housing is finally finished at the Timothy Centre, and last week my team members and I moved into the houses we’ll be occupying for our time here. It must be said: these houses are lovely! We’ve got all the mod cons and some features that are really nice even by North American standards, let alone African standards. We even use “green” technology what with our solar electricity, solar hot water heaters and harvested rain water. It is really great to have my own home to set up and to be able to unpack some of the bags that haven’t really been touched since I packed them in June.

The new house requires a fair investment of time to maintain, however, and sometimes I feel like I could spend each day just doing domestic chores. The greatest challenge is trying to keep the light-coloured tiles on the floor clean. Since the site is still in the process of being landscaped and it is the rainy season, even a quick trip outside results in muddy shoes that leave reddish-brown footprints on the tiles. Even if the ground is dry, the red dust gets tracked in. There is also an interesting situation each morning as there are usually lots of dead bugs on the floor that were attracted to the porch lights outside and then met their demise; I’m not exaggerating when I say that I sweep the floor about five times a day and mop it once a day.

Pre-planning and adequate time are also required to complete kitchen chores. When I buy fresh produce at the local market, I let it soak for a few minutes in a diluted bleach/water solution in order to get it clean enough to be able to eat it. Similarly, each morning and evening I boil a kettle of water and pour it into the water filter to have clean drinking water. Doing dishes is simpler in the new house, because I actually have hot water coming out of the taps and don’t need to heat it on the stove first like we did at the other place. Running water is convenient, but when you can’t drink it straight from the tap, you need to evaluate how you intend to use it every time you turn on the faucet and act accordingly.

Having said all that....even with the all the work associated with the activities of daily living, it is wonderful to be moved onto this gorgeous site with the beautiful view from my living room window, nothing but the sound of crickets and frogs at night and great neighbours next door.