One of my favorite days here is Tuesday,
for a couple reasons. One of them being that it's the
day we help Aunt Jackie grocery shop for the mamas, which is one of my favorite
jobs. First we go to each mama’s house, collect their empty laundry and dish soap containers and get their lists. Aunt Jackie gives the mamas lists with the food items they may need already printed on it. If the mamas need it they put a check mark next to the item. They have a weekly meal plan, so to some
extent they all eat the same thing, although the mamas may fix food differently
from each other. Each mama has crates
with their names on them, and we line them up on a table in the storage room. There we also keep a lot of non-perishable
items so we can just fill up most of their order. Every few months the staff has to go bulk
grocery shopping to keep the shelves stocked.
There are freezers to keep meat and other frozen foods and vegetables as well. Aunt Jackie fills up their cleaning supplies
and we also keep toiletries on hand as well. When we finish filling the crates the mamas will take
their crates home and put their groceries away while we go to the store to get fresh vegetables, eggs, or
anything we ran out of. When we come
back to the Village we finish handing out the rest of their groceries and the mamas bring all
the crates back.
While filling up their
crates I also get to see some of the more interesting things they eat. Something I haven’t tried yet but would like to
is buttermilk rusks. I’ve heard them
described as similar to biscotti and they eat them with their tea. They do drink a lot of tea, I think that is
because they have some British background.
Some other things that happened last week were that on Sunday Mama Thambisa, mama to mostly the older
boys, invited us to eat supper at her house. She fixed chicken, beetroot with chutney, pumpkin (which may have
actually been butternut squash, any type of squash they call pumpkin), rice,
and potato salad. The chicken was very
good, and they all loved eating the bones as well. Mama Tselang said when she was growing up the
children did not eat meat. The adults
would eat the meat and the children got to eat the bones. The boys were so excited that we were eating
with them and I think everyone had a good time eating together!
Last Friday, Kholisile, (my pronunciation guide would look like this: Coal-i-see-lay), won first place in track for the 80 meter and 100 meter for this region of South Africa. He has another track meet Saturday. We were able to watch him run and I also got a couple pictures.
Some of these pictures go with the post from last week but I just go them uploaded. I captioned them so hopefully it will be easy to tell what they are.
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| Sorting clothes |
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| Clothes sorted |
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| The back of the car loaded up with groceries |
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| A little bit of bulk shopping |
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| Kholisile after winning first in two races! |
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| Beginning to fill the mamas' crates |
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| Busi was our little helper this week! |
Thank you for sharing all of these details. I find it all so interesting! I like learning about food and what people eat around the world. Has most of what you have been eating been foods you are familiar with?
ReplyDeleteI have mostly eaten foods that I would eat at home, or very similar. I have tried a couple of different things but nothing very unusual or exotic! Which I am actually very thankful for because I am not very adventurous when it comes to eating new foods.
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