Life in Burundi Part 2: Food, Work, Play

I am noticing that we are beginning to find a rhythm to life here and I thought I would share some of the ordinary routines that we have established. It is Saturday morning, and I have chosen this time to write and post my weekly blog entry. The timing is good because Bujumbura has a sort of community service curfew on Saturday from 7am to 10am. No one is allowed to go out or drive around during this time. Everyone is to be involved in community service projects, like cleaning the neighborhood.

This week I am happy to say that I have returned to my morning running routine I have not had the chance to restart this since I left the USA and it is good to get back into it. (Burundians run for exercise but seeing a Mzungu—white man, run is definitely a curiosity.) Generally our weekly routine looks like this:

Oren and I usually get up around 6 am. I make coffee for Rebecca and I, and peanut butter (nutella) toast for Oren. He watches a video (on my computer) while I read the Bible, at 6:30 am I go for a run and Rebecca gets up and bathes ( I am happy to say we have running hot water in tub, but not in the sinks). When I get back we make breakfast for ourselves, (usually fruit—mango, papaya, banana), and eggs or oatmeal. (Kellogs Cornflakes are available here for about $15 per box, so we do not have cereal.) Our cook Marcelline arrives around 8:30 am and does the breakfast dishes, if we haven’t managed to do them. At the beginning of the week, Rebecca makes a week’s schedule of meals for her to prepare. So, Marcelline often has come from the market with food for a few days. The marketing part of cooking is complicated and expensive (for a white person) and so getting food for the household is an important part of the cook’s duties.

Food here is really in raw form. The selection is also quite limited. We can generally get the following: UHT (long-life) milk, sugar, eggs, cheese (one kind only), tomatoes, beef (ground), potatoes, red beans, rice, cassava, onion, garlic, flour, and some baked bread. Fruit includes bananas, mangoes, papaya, passion fruit, avocado, and Japanese plums (little egg shaped purple fruits – you remove the top and squeeze out seeds and sweet & sour purple juice to add to fruit salad). Vegetables include carrots, green beans, cucumbers, peas and spinach. We can also get local coffee and tea. Burundian coffee is grown here and quite good. Other food that is available is quite expensive, especially anything prepackaged. (APPLES ARE NONEXISTANT.) So, if we want anything, like spaghetti sauce or tortillas, we have to make it from scratch. That is why a cook is so essential. There are literally hours of work to do in the kitchen everyday. We generally eat simply. We have fruit and toast for breakfast (sometimes an egg or oatmeal), rice and beans for lunch, and usually a salad and something with ground beef and potatoes, or rice, or tortillas for dinner. A side dish of green beans and carrots or peas is pretty standard. Variety is really a luxury here so we don’t change our menu much.

Our house has a garden around it, inside a high wall, with a wide variety of trees and flowers. It’s a nice place for Oren to play – he loves to run around the house, following the concrete drainage ditch. Apparently, this will be a real asset in the rainy season, keeping our house from flooding. At the moment, it’s the dry season, so the plants need to be watered daily. We have a gardener/day guard who comes three times a week. Honestly, there’s not so much for him to do, so we have him clean up a little kiddie pool for Oren to splash in (left by the previous family). We also have a nightguard who stays up much of the night, keeping an eye out for bandits. He is assisted in his work by Bella, a golden retriever (also left by the previous family). She’s leashed during the day, but is very good at discerning when to bark – only when there is a knock on our gate.

You might wonder why we have so many workers at our house. One perspective is this: in a country when so many people are impoverished or underemployed, it is considered selfish not to have house workers. If you can afford it, you are expected to have at least three people working for you. And this also means you assume responsibility for their health care and for helping them out in family emergencies. It’s actually a lot of work to manage so many people, so there’s definitely a trade-off between the help you receive and the effort you put into keeping all the people busy…That’s mostly Rebecca’s job.

Three days a week we have a babysitter for Oren so Rebecca and I can both go to the office. Her name is Denise and Oren seems to like her. She speaks only French and Kirundi so Oren is getting a crash course. He is resistant to learning it at this point, but does say Bonjour, Ca va? Rebecca and I study language on Mon, Wed, and Fri. afternoon. She does French and I do Kirundi. She seems to be progressing more rapidly than me, but in all fairness, Kirundi is really structurally different than English.

On workdays (M-F) we are at the office where we answer a lot of email from Akron headquarters and other regional offices, and we make a lot of phone calls on our cell phones. Cell phones are the primary means of communication here and text messaging is used far more commonly than email. We are getting good at it now. Much of our work is arranging payments to our partners or planning for travel to visit their projects. We also have to keep meticulous track of every penny we spend and every dollar we change and record it, so that takes some time as well.

One thing that takes getting used to is using cash for EVERYTHING. We have yet to find an establishment in Burundi that takes credit cards (forget about debit cards!). All salaries, grants, rent, shopping, etc. are done in cash. That is a big change from the USA and means we make frequent trips to the bank and money changers.

On the weekend, as I said, we rest at home on Sat. morning and try to do things as a family on Saturday and/or Sunday. We go to a church on Sunday that is presented in French and English, although many of the songs are in Kirundi as well. We have also started a Bible study on Wednesday evening at our house. For entertainment we like to go to Club du Lac Tangayika, a large hotel next to Lake Tanganyika with a swimming pool for adults and kids, as well as some other attractions. It is on the beach so we can go there as well. There is a limited playground there that would never pass American safety standards, but Oren likes it and digs in the sand as well. Here are Oren and I at the beach near Club T. The water is Lake Tanganyika.

I did want to say something about Burundian local cuisine as well: It is quite tasty, and there is some variety. To Oren’s joy, one of the favorite dishes is deep fried potatoes, ie: French fries! They love French fries as a staple. Cooked peas and cooked red beans are the other staple. Usually a salad with tomatoes, avocadoes and raw onions is common at Burundian meals as well. Beef or goat in chops or a broth are common too. If you are wealthy you might have rice instead of potatoes. Most food is sautéed with onion in palm oil. There is a local hot sauce called pili-pili that is very hot, but is a nice addition to the food. There are 3 non-alcoholic cold things to drink here besides water: Coke (only regular in bottles), Fanta (like sprite), and passionfruit juice (sold in a concentrate and diluted with water—Oren is allergic to it). Milk is expensive. We can also get coffee and tea which we put powdered milk and sugar into.

Here is a picture of Burundian fare at a restaurant we were at recently upcountry. It is probably hard to tell what things are. Keep in touch, we will be in Kigali Rwanda next week so will have access to Skype. My Skype name is pamosley. If you have it, find out when we are online and we will talk to you.