#3 In My Top Ten List

Over the past (almost) five years I have been presented with various challenges while living here in Tanzania. If I were to make a list my top ten challenges, I definitely would place food in the top three of that list.
Now, I love Tanzanian food. Jodie and I have learned to cook many things that are commonly eaten here and we enjoy them very much. In fact just last night we went out to dinner with Pastor Rita and our four oldest girls and Jodie and I both ordered a traditional African meal for dinner.
But there are times when we find ourselves on an adventure where we have traveled a great distance and there are no paved roads in sight (or any kind of road at all in many cases), no running water, no electricity and definitely no sign of any other vehicle besides our own. The people that we are visiting out in the middle of nowhere are so excited that we are there to see them and they want to serve us refreshments.
Usually the food prepared for us usually involves either chicken, beef or goat meat and the drink is some form of Fanta or a Coke (99.9% of the time it is warm). The challenging part is not eating the meat because anyone who knows me knows that I love to eat meat. The part that I find a bit tricky at times is the meat parts presented on my plate. Sometimes when we eat at someone’s home they will present the food to us “self service” style. When that happens I just pick and choose for myself what meat pieces I am going to put on my plate, but most of the time we are served our food already on the plate. On many occasions I will be given an unrecognizable piece of meat that I have given the name “hedgehog.” I’m not sure what part of the body that piece comes from but I am telling you the truth that it looks like one of those little hedgehogs that I have seen all over the place running around mostly at night. That piece of meat doesn’t have a lot of taste to it but if you are a texture kind of person then this is not for you. There are other meat parts that I definitely recognize on my plate, but never ate them when I was living in California. You see it seems to be that just about all the parts of the animal are cooked and eaten. One time we were offered a meal of chicken and rice. The chicken was cooked and cut up and placed in a container on the table for us to help ourselves. We opened the cover and there it was! The whole chicken cut up into various parts!!! The feet, head and all sorts of body parts from the inside and outside of the chicken…all there for us to enjoy!
Now I have to say that I kind of enjoy the challenge of eating things here that are unfamiliar and take me out of my comfort zone. Jodie and I have been in uncountable situations where we have eaten things that have been hard to swallow, hard to chew, hard to look at, hard to stick in our mouths and hard to keep down.
But hip hip hurray for me because I don’t back down from the challenge of eating anything foreign or scary!
UNTIL THIS WEEK!!!
Ok…So I just can’t believe it even as I reflect on it all again. This week I couldn’t do it! I just couldn’t do it!!! It has been almost five years and this week was it for me…the week that I lost the challenge!

Earlier this week Jodie and I found ourselves at the home of someone we didn’t know but were there because we were helping out a friend of ours. That friend stepped outside for a little while and the girl who was in the house went into the kitchen. A couple minutes later she returned with two glasses of what looked like to be milk. This was a first for me to be given milk to drink at someone’s house. So as she walked over to us with the two glasses of milk I had a funny feeling inside of me. We each took a glass and thanked her for our beverage. Jodie immediately started digging in her purse for something to put her gum in so she could drink her milk. So she was slightly distracted and didn’t immediately notice what I was staring at in my glass. Yes it was white (sort of off white really) but that is all that was going on with it if you were going to compare it to milk. My liquid beverage was barely a liquid. It was so thick that you probably could have poured it on a paper towel and it wouldn’t have seeped through. Then to add on to the thickness of the liquid there were large clumps floating around inside too. I stared at it and thought to myself, “Is that fur on top of the milk?” I was in awe of my liquid beverage. I glanced over at Jodie who had taken out her small notebook and was tearing a piece of paper to dispose her chewing gum in it. She seemed to take forever to rip that piece of paper out of that little notebook. I wanted her to look at her liquid beverage and see exactly what I was staring at. But since she was moving in what felt like slow motion, I decided to go ahead and put the glass up to my nose so I could find out what kind of scent this madness could possibly have. Yep…you know what I am going to say. A smell like the one I smelled must be in a liquid beverage that looks like that. The best way to describe it is to say it smelled like dirty socks worn for a week straight that were dipped in sewer water.
Because our day had started early that morning when we were unexpectedly called to help our friend early in the morning, we had not eaten breakfast. At the time we were presented this white-ish looking beverage it was after 1pm. Jodie and I were both very hungry and were ready to eat just about anything. But after smelling that stuff I didn’t think I could drink it.
After I finished smelling my beverage I looked at Jodie. She had just put her gum in the paper and looked at me. I told her, “Take a look at your beverage and smell it.” She did and then in a very matter of fact way said to me, “Well we gotta drink it.” Her words were so matter of fact. She said it like there was no other option, but then that has been our way since the beginning…we just go for it no matter what the food or beverage is! So I told myself that I would be drinking this beverage and mentally prepared myself to take it all in. I put the glass to my mouth and took a drink and at the same time Jodie did the exact same thing. I swallowed it down as best as I could and looked at Jodie who had just finished swallowing the gulp she had put in her mouth. I stared at her as I sat there holding my glass and said to her, “I can’t do it.” We both just sat there in silence gazing into our glasses of whatever that madness was inside that glass. Then right at that moment the girl in the house and a man who was also in the house both got up to check on something outside. We could see them outside from where we were sitting. Jodie then suggested that we put our glasses down on the table and casually go outside. It sounded like our best option. I didn’t want to offend anyone by leaving the beverage there without finishing it but drinking it was no longer an option after that first taste. So we set our glasses down and stepped outside. Just as we got outside our friend came over to us and was ready to leave. We jumped in the truck and headed out.