The One With All The Cooking (written 8/27/2012)

Today we had our first cooking lesson.  Wow, I don’t really know where to begin.  Well for starters, I guess I had in my head that my fall back meal would be rice and beans.  That is what we learned to make today.  Would anyone like to guess how long it takes to cook rice and beans in Tanzania…. 5 hours… yup that’s right, I will be spending 5 hours a day cooking my fall back meal over my jiko (charcoal cooker, by the way I will have to carry a bag of charcoal that is as big as I am 45 minutes up the hill to my house).  It’s just a casual 17 step cooking process here.  So I have a new fall back plan… avocados. They are cheap and they can be eaten raw so I don’t have to light the jiko. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I will be eating avocados.  For our next cooking lesson we are scheduled to learn how to make bread… over charcoals… making rice is overwhelming right now so I have no idea how bread is going to go.  I guess I will let you know on Wednesday. 

Overall things have been going well.  We have had a few more sessions but mostly we are lesson planning and spending time in the classroom here in Iringa which has been an awesome experience so far.  I will be teaching Wednesday and Thursday mornings, subsets and subset operations.  I realized all over again how much of a math nerd I am today when I was looking through the textbook that I bought and getting super excited about all of these topics I get to teach… I cant wait to start J looking forward to letting you know how it goes!