Just across the road from our house was a beautiful garden. The pictures just don't do justice of how nice it was to walk by it every day and see all the plants in the well-maintained garden! The garden was not here before Bill Stinson's arrival at Chimala, but now many vegetables are grown for use by the missionaries and the guests in the various houses on the mission. In the garden are okra, cabbage, tomatoes, eggplant, corn, and much more. River water is routed to the garden for irrigation.
Every day workers are in the garden taking care of it.
This is the son of one of the workers. He wanted his picture made, so he ran over to the fence!
The next photo shows the hand-dug irrigation ditches.
The man in the following photo works for the people who live next to the garden. The woman who lives in the house is in charge of the garden. Most of the workers around the mission are afraid of their dog, Stavrous, but he is actually very friendly.
Here are the banana trees. You will be able to see green bananas on them. The bananas are picked green because if left on the trees to ripen, the monkeys will steal them!
Next is a papaya tree.
The following is a view of our pantry with the banana stalk hanging from the ceiling. These very small bananas are less than six inches long but very sweet and good!
Next is our cook, Jane. The photo shows the first thing she did every morning, which was to tie back the kitchen curtains to let the light inside. She is a great cook. She has been cooking for Americans so long that she knows how to cook American food for them! She makes everything from scratch, even hamburger buns, biscuits, loaves of bread, and cinnamon rolls-----everything is wonderful! There was a long list of choices of food that she could cook for us, so each week we decided on the menus for the week. Jane bought a few food items across the street at the Chimala market, but most of the food was purchased by Cyndi on her weekly grocery shopping/medicine-buying-for-the-hospital trip to Mbeya, which is 50 miles from Chimala.
It was great to walk home at lunchtime every day to find a delicious, hot meal on the table waiting for us and to come home at 6:00 p.m. and find food in the oven for dinner! We wish we could have brought Jane home with us! We got spoiled quickly!
The next photo shows Jan looking over the long list of food from which to choose the week's menu.
The last week before we left we asked Jane to prepare a traditional Tanzanian meal for us. We had beans, rice, spinach, a type of tortilla, and a dish called ugale, which is made from ground white corn. The closest food we know to ugale would be grits. It really has very little taste. The Africans usually eat it with their hands and dip it into some kind of spicy dip. It is the main food that is eaten every day by the natives. Because corn is widely grown in Tanzania, ugale is a very inexpensive meal.
Ugale is in the plate at the bottom of the next picture. Notice the spinach in the second photo below; it was really good. It is not like our common spinach in the U.S. If anyone could let us know where we could purchase it here, we would love to buy some.
2 comments:
Since you and Mama Julie have the same name, you should have made a picture with her. The food pictures were very interesting. I can see why you would like to have that cook full time here.
The garden has been there for around 40 years.......Mzungu
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