Food

Alright, so I will quickly broach the subject of food for a bit. If any of you are wondering, yes, this is an attempt to get pity from you.

In Guinea there are 3 main sauces: Peanut sauce, soup sauce, and leaf sauce. With these you can add any type of meat, and for the leaf sauce you can either use potato plant leafs or Manioc leafs.

I actually like all three for the most part, but they are not anywhere close to the variety and flavor of food you can get in the US. Also, you are hard pressed to fine something with more then 2 different kinds of veggies in it. Mostly there is tomatoes and onions…

Now, where I live (Haute Guinea) there is also something called To. This is made from pounding manioc and boiling it in water. Eventually, after a process I don’t really understand, you have this weird, really thick, paste kind of stuff. Now, the proper way to eat it is to take some in your spoon or with your hand, and dip it into a gooey okra sauce called gombo, and then eat it.

Again, I actually can eat it without a problem, but the texture of both the To and the sauce is a bit rough.

For breakfasts there is something called bouie, which is kind of like a porridge, and for lunch a lot of people eat Kay Kay, which is, yet again, another food make out of Manioc.

As you can probably tell, Manioc is one of their major foods. It is just this white starchy potato-like thing that is easy to grow year round. This makes getting people their nutritional needs difficult. They eat TONS of this stuff, and when they are full, they think all is well, while in actuality, they have not gotten very much real nutritional value from it.

As for other things that you can find on the streets, there is a plethora of snacks. You can get fried doughy stuff, fried plantains, bananas, avocados, little bags of peanuts, etc. Not all of these are in my village, but these are kind of the standard ones.

For drinking, they put a lot of drinks into sachès, or plastic bags, that you bite the end off and drink that way. They put anything into these little plastic bags. They will put pressed black coffee, really strong tea, juice made from ginger, juice made from a fruit called Bissap, and more. They will even sell small amounts of gasoline from these little bags, but not to drink :-P

Alright, well, that’s my random food post. I will update as I learn more.