Posts Tagged ‘food’
What women — and men — really want
When I walk to the main road, I try to give people I pass a friendly, “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” with my best pronunciation. Mostly I pass Rwandans, but this weekend a tall white man and I approached each other. For some reason, greeting white people makes me exceedingly shy — but I could [...]
What expats really need
I was having coffee the other day with a media trainer the other day, who’s here with his family. It’s awkward to retell someone else’s story, especially when you know they’ll probably read it on your blog, but I’d never heard a story that so perfectly summarizes what it is like to live in Africa [...]
Ode to Africa Bite
No, this is not a restaurant whose name is also an imperative sentence. “Bite” is Kinyarwanda for, loosely, “What’s up?” And Africa Bite is my favorite lunch joint in Kimihurura the neighborhood where I stay. You can slop as much food as you can carry, on a giant, thick clay plate, and get a Fanta [...]
The universalities and idiosyncracies of civil service
The mail in Kigali works. I can finally vouch for it personally. It takes a while–one month, door to door, for a package from my mom. Which doesn’t sound so bad, except she thought she was paying for it to arrive in four days. Well, she did pay for that. What she forgot was the [...]
It is your moral responsiblity to begin growing rice
Food prices are high, blah blah, we all know. Not that that’s not important. But this seems more important: Donors–who presumably (she says with typical glibness) apply the same sound business judgment to their philanthropy budgets as they do to the books of the corporations that made them all that money in the first place–have [...]
What do white people know about exotic plants, anyway?
That stuff in the garden I thought was bamboo? It’s sugar cane. This is just the latest in a long, long list of things I am ignorant about. Like lemons. They start out so small and round and green I thought the current object of my affection was a lime tree. My lesson in sugar [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [