Kenya

Every year, I volunteer with the charity Habitat for Humanity on a house-building project abroad. The original plan this year was to return to Tanzania where I was last year, but last minute changes meant I went to Kenya instead.

We were posted to a tiny little village called Kaplong, right in the middle of Kenya's beautiful tea plantations in the west of the country (not far from where Obama's granny lives, if I try to be topical). It was not the Kenya you'd imagine - gorgeously green, the skies poured nearly every day, and was really rather cold at night.

We were lucky enough to have food cooked for us by local women everyday, and the food was simple and delicious. As you can imagine, most Kenyans bulk up with lots of carbohydrates - rice, potatoes and maize form the majority of any meal. The national dish is a carb-heavy concoction called ugali, a dough-like substance made of maize, kind of like dried up wallpaper paste. I had this in Tanzania last year, and I still haven't acquired the taste! Thankfully, we were only treated to it once, and instead, our meals were more like the one below:

Rice, peas, chicken, and cabbage - very healthy and very delicious. Another thing I fell in love with was the dish sukuma wiki, which in Swahili literally means "stretch the week" - a spinach/kale dish cooked with onions and tomatoes. Unfortunately though, given the amount of food I ate, I think I came back gaining weight :(

I also thought I would for once post a photo that is not food-related - here is a picture of the beautiful house that we built!



We had started from scratch, digging the foundations for this basic 4-roomed brick house, and by the end, we had got to the lintels above the windows. All in 10 days!

Just before we left Kenya, we visited the very famous Carnivore restaurant back in Nairobi. The guidebooks boast that it is one of the Top 50 restaurants in the world, so of course I was dubious. As the name suggests, it is supposed to be a treat for carnivores - a huge selection of meat is grilled in-house and carved at your table:

Unfortunately, I think the reason this place got so famous was the game meat it used to serve - anything from zebras to warthogs. However, the Kenyan government has banned the serving of game meats now (not surprising given the tourist income the country receives from foreigners coming to safari), and the only 'interesting' meats served are ostrich and crocodile. As someone in my group said, 'it's just like a carvery back at home!' - the meat is generally overcooked and tough, but we did like the ostrich meatballs.