Skip to main content

Uganda unit study - foods

Every tribe in Uganda has different food preferences, but they tend to revolve around these basics.  Boarding school students (i.e. the vast majority of secondary school students) generally eat posho and beans daily except for a Sunday portion of meat.  Imagine eating the same food for every meal!

"Food" is the starch while everything else is the "soup" that goes with the food.  Generally a large quantity of the starch is portioned out with a smaller quantity of the soup. "Foods" include:

  • White sweet potato (peeled and boiled)
  • Cassava/manioc (as chips)
  • Irish potatoes (peeled and boiled)
  • White maize (posho - as a loaf of sticky "bread")
  • Millet (atapa or kalo - as a loaf of sticky "bread")
  • Matoke/green plantain (best when steamed in banana leaves)
  • Rice
The "soup" includes a wide variety of ingredients in these categories:
  • Greens
  • Beans
  • Cabbage
  • Peanuts - ground into flour or paste depending on the tribe
  • Meats (generally reserved for special occasions) - chicken, goat, beef, pork
  • Fish (regionally) - tilapia, Nile perch
  • Boiled pumpkin (not actually a soup - perhaps more of a side dish)
Snacks would be:
  • Chapati (can also go with a meal)
  • Rolex (yes! Look it up here)
  • Fruits off the trees (mango, papaya, banana, pineapple, guava, jackfruit, oranges)
  • Peanuts/groundnuts
  • Porridge (maize or millet or cassava mix)
  • Chai (any black tea - with or without milk or spices but always with sugar - to be taken most definitely around 10:30am every day)
  • Popcorn
Here are some very interesting pages from a book about the social aspects of Iteso eating.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Family of Three!

We are in Liberia - the electricity goes in and out because the generator is having trouble keeping up these days! So hopefully it will stay on long enough to post and the internet connection will allow me this luxury! We were united with precious Gracie on Thanksgiving day - I will write more about this later. But, oh! is Gracie a joy! She is so beautiful, so joyfilled, and a bit mischievious. Her physical limitations do not permit her to accomplish much mischief, but we can tell that she is trying to push some limits already. If we were not in love with her already, she is irresitable and such a treasure and blessing from God. In our two days together, she has not cried once. She spends most of her days smiling, she loves to snuggle (good match for us!), and has the most contagious laugh! Life takes more effort for her - her cerebral palsy is moderate and every activity is a challenge and is clearly tiring for her. Meal times (which she loves) take a long time and much patience and d...
6 comments
Read more

New Stage of Life

Gracie has entered a new developmental stage. She now is active and has been rolling all over the floor. We cleared out a little living room so that she would have room to roll around - she's rolling front to back, both directions. She also has been much easier to get up on all fours - it used to take 3-4 adults to cram her into the crawling position due to her resistance. She now even spontaneously gets into a semi-crawling position on her own. In the crawling position she's been weight bearing even on her right arm (but always in combination with her left arm). She also has been rocking a little in the crawling position as if she gets it that this is a way that you can move! It's been so exciting. But it also makes her much more eager to be down with other kids and moving around. She's in a very active active stage, always moving, and wanting to move. She's also taken, not just a huge interest in other kids, but also interest in toys a bit more. She's so fun!
4 comments
Read more

The Foolishness of God's Calling

A friend shared with me how "strange" (and scary) our decisions appear to those observing our lives. Most people are barely surviving residency and then for me to decide to adopt, to decide to adopt a child with special needs, to decide to adopt this child from the uncertainty of Liberia, to decide to start my Master's of Public Health during residency... it all seems crazy and overwhelming to the observer. But what my friend did not take into account is that God's calling on our lives will not always appear sane. Our choices are neither noble nor insane if they are what God has called us to. These choices are simply obedience to sovereign God! We are not living for life in this world, we are in fact aliens to this world and shouldn't settle down and get too comfortable because our joy is in heaven. God calls each of us to "not waste our lives" but live each day with an eternal focus. With an eternal focus, we should not only adopt a child with disabil...
4 comments
Read more