Cow Foot and Banana Stew

I'm always sweaty by the time I get home in the evenings. It's about a forty minute walk up Mt. Uruguru to my host family's house and (as my host father says), I walk like a solider. Anyway when I get home I put water on to warm up for my bucket bath and then I go hang out in the living room and chat with my host dad for a little bit. When I went back into the kitchen last night to get the water to shower, Josephina, my host sister, had apparently switched the water around on me. So I pull the lid off the pot I thought was my bathwater and inside are these long, white stumpy bones in a boiling mass of brown water.

Host mama, over my shoulder, goes, "do you know what that is?"

One possible answer to that question would be "something I never want to put in my mouth" and another would be "what we ate for dinner" but the most specific answer is probably a stew they make here by boiling cow hooves for five to seven hours and then adding peas and bananas. I was not happy about that but I was an adult about the situation: at dinner I pulled the hoof part off and then cut it into bites that were small enough to swallow without chewing. Still, it was bad...psychologically. It tasted like nothing so much as beef glue and I was supremely aware of the hoof nature of the whole experience.

But I wanted to start the blog with this story because really...that's it. That's like the worst thing that's happened to me so far. I had to eat a little bit of cow hoof and I wasn't happy about it. But, I mean, I liked the rest of the stew a lot. They have a way of cooking unripe bananas that make them taste like the best boiled potatoes ever and I had two of those and some awesome coconut milk and peas. And I'm really liking it here. I'm learning Kiswahili as fast as I can (nowhere near fast enough) and having a really good time.

Anyway...here are some photos to catch you up on what happened between the United States and the cow foot stew.



Jordan and Mike coming to class at the Training Site here at Morogoro where we stayed before our host families.