Uganda Read This!: Cooking Class

Cooking food in Uganda is a feat… Whether you are trying to make homemade bread or come up with something innovative to do with your popcorn, often times we just wait for a package to arrive filled with nuts, beef jerky, granola bars, and dried fruit.

Like most other Volunteers, I choose to cook at home, which means rarely do I cook traditional Ugandan food. During my time here I have found many of new foods that have expanded my palate and favorites that I have been able to creatively adapt and expand upon, including falafel and roasted cabbage to stuffed green peppers and cauliflower soup.

While these ingredients are not always available, you can count on the following… Tomatoes, garlic, green peppers, carrots, cabbage, garlic, onions, eggs, lecere (small, dried fish), maize (corn), and bananas.

With our handy Peace Corps cookbook, we are given recipes galore on how to best turn these items into some of our favorite, familiar meals.

The Ugandans are not so lucky and often times find themselves eating the same meal, day in and day out. Unfortunately, many of these meals are filled with carbohydrates and have a lack of vitamins and minerals for the young ones.

Meeting Point has allowed me the opportunity to work with many of their existing projects, one being Healthy Mother Models, HMM. HMM works with mothers and their young children to help educate on healthy behaviors, including water, sanitation, hygiene, and food.

Some few weeks ago, I attended a cooking class with two of the Meeting Point staff, which addressed fortified food for infants and toddlers. As we ventured to the home where the program was taking place, we stopped by the market to pick up the essentials. As we arrived, the women were setting up the charcoal stoves with their babies strapped to the back. We laid out a tarp where the women then sat to begin chopping produce, sorting through rice for stones, grinding the lecere, and picking the leafy greens from their stem.

As the charcoal began to heat, everyone arrived to learn how to make these enriched dishes. Dish #1: mashed cassava with sautéed onions, tomatoes, lecere, eggs, and odi, which is the equivalent of organic peanut butter. Dish #2: beef pieces for protein and flavoring with onions, tomatoes, greens, and eggs, all added to maize flour, which gave it the consistency of baby food.

As you can see, the above dishes have all the components of GO, GROW, and GLOW foods, which comprise a healthy, balanced diet. GO foods are your carbohydrates, GROW foods are your proteins, and GLOW foods are your vitamins and minerals.

We made some rice to accompany the dishes we prepared and as the children anxiously washed their hands and waited for their lunch, you could see the eagerness to try the new food. As they scooped up their nutritious meals with their bare hands, they licked off each morsel left on their fingers.

We explained to the mothers the importance of making dishes such as these for those young children who have been weaned from breast milk. Without such nutrients, malnutrition becomes a problem and there are too many, negative long lasting effects, such as the risk of infection and infectious diseases, increased onset of active tuberculosis and an increase of HIV transmission from the mother to the child. The last being of utmost importance being some of the mothers are HIV-positive.

This program had me very excited about my work in Uganda and with my organization.

Next stop with the mothers?

Building hand-washing stations, also known as tippy taps, outside the latrines to avoid transferring diarrheal diseases to others.