cilantro v. coriander - a debate for the ages

as much as i love our village, and the people there, i love the time we spend here in the big city. the PC house is in the center of town, within walking distance from pretty much everything. across the street is a restaurant with great burgers and fries and a bar with the best street meat in the country. next door is an internet cafe (in which i am currently sitting), and down the street are more bars, supermarkets, a bakery, tailor, and the petit marche where you can find anything from shoes to lettuce.

One reason i love being in the city is because i know that i can get anything at any time. instant gratification, so uniquely american. in village, when i see an avocato or a pineapple, i stomp on goats and push little children over to get my hands on the goodies. if i feel like an avocado or some carrots for an evening snack while i'm here, i just walk out the door and look for a woman or a child walking around with a plate of food on their head. instant.

this evening, brian and i had a cameroonian dish prepared by a woman who runs a restaurant. its more like a room with two benches and two half tables next to an area where she cooks all day. she speaks very little french and only serves a few dishes a night-all cameroonian. we had couscous and fulary sauce for 60 cents each.

when i first came to cameroonian i heard that a staple food here is couscous. great, i love couscous at home. unfortunately, no one told me that its absolutely nothing like what we think of when we think of those little balls of goodness that cook in just 5 minutes. no, the couscous here is either corn or manioc based and has the consistancy of mashed up rice. its served on a plate in a football shaped loaf about the size of two of my fists. it tastes like.....i'm not sure. maybe like mashed up rice. i'll have to think about that. its not horrible, if its prepared right and if there is no dirt in it. its served with one of a variety of sauces. one eats the couscous and sauce with their fingers (with the RIGHT hand, of course) and makes quite a mess of your hand. lots of slurping and licking from the more disgusting eaters.

gumbo was the most popular sauce for our family when we were up in Pitoa for training. again, NOT like the gumbo you're thinking of. its dried okra boiled with oil (and other stuff?) and is slimey. it drips from your fingers and mouth in long stringy lines as you eat and looks like it tastes horrible. i have not had the nerve to try it. other sauces include ndole and fulary. ndole is some sort of green vegetable and can be a very bitter sauce if it is not cleaned and cooked properly. fulary is also green, but not bitter or slimey. its the preferred sauce for brian and i when we eat couscous. (there is also a fulary drink, but i'm still very confused as to if its the same plant that you use to make each, the same part of the plant, or something different completely. i think the drink comes from hibiscus flowers. or leaves)

as you can see, i really don't describe these foods well, and i apologize to the people of cameroon for my account. but i do know that couscous and these sauces are very labor intensive. you have to pound the corn or manioc into a powder and boil it and stir vigerously. some of the sauces have to be boiled, rinsed, and boiled again. all of this is over a cook stove on the ground made of three large rocks with burning wood placed between them. usually the room (if its not outside) is unlit with no windows or ventilation. i remember trying to cook in the kitchen in Pitoa and was immediatly running from the room with my eyes burning and my nose on fire.

so, for all the work this woman did today, we gave her 300cfa each. some things just dont make sense.