A Taste of Poverty III

Tuesday afternoon: Who'd have thought this would become a foodie blog?! well its not your average foodie blog and its definitely temporary. After a delicious lunch of ugali and greens (pictured), I sat down to do my budget...and im scarily close to having spent my (generous) $2/day already.

Rent (equivalent for a 2 roomed, tin roofed ‘apartment’ with shared ablutions), charcoal (fee for using gas stove), soap and candles come to 610MK. 4 Buckets of water a day and food items already purchased brings the grand total to 1515MK. My food supply so far consists of a weeks supply of maize flour, oil, salt, onions, beans and rice, and a few tomatoes, cassava, a pumpkin, a days supply of greens and some peanuts. Im really hoping there’ll be room in the budget for an egg with dinner tonight.

I’ve chosen a bad time to take on this challenge. With harvest still a few weeks away, maize flour is at an all time high price and tomatoes... I dunno why they are so expensive- but they are 20-25 MK each which means if you are working a manual labour job- your days wage could buy you...4 or 5 tomatoes! Go figure.

I also have a confession to make- this afternoon as I was starting my grammar lesson, my blood sugar levels dropped and I got the shakes and couldn't concentrate...so I ate an anzac bikky. I guess it shows that the ugali looks impressive in quantity but doesn't have substance. Esn- then informed me that i could buy a quarter kg of sugarfor 30MK, so, as soon as the lesson was over I stunned a shop keeper and she introduced me to the evening markets- amazing seeing the whole place bustling with people in the cool of the evening and lit with candles!

I ended up having my egg for dinner. yum!

If you like the look of the food - or you're curious to try it -the recipies are all in my blog archives somewhere tagged with 'cooking'. Im amazed at how tasty oil, onion and tomato can be- and how comforting a stomach full of ugali is- Im really enjoying this challenge.