Comfort Food

I've been baking a lot lately. Cake, brownies, breads, cookies...anything that my local ingredients will allow (and where they won't, I improvise). I create a makeshift oven, out of three saucepans and a few small stones, on top of one of my burners and hope for the best. The ability to bake, despite the rarity of me baking in the states, has brought comfort. It has also given me a new opportunity in work-- the secretary from our organization was quite excited to learn that I could bake and arranged for me to teach baking lessons at our resource center. I began this past Wednesday by teaching my ten high-school and older aged female students to make a basic cake. The use of a coal fired "sigiiri" rather than my propane fueled burner made the baking process more difficult and unpredictable, yet was most appropriate based on the means my students would have at their disposal. Another, more humorous challenge, was finding activities to fill our time as the cake was slowly baking. The girls asked that I teach them a song or dance from America and so I taught them the Macarena and Hokey-Pokey, the first things that came to mind. There was much giggling from the students and on my part as I realized how ridiculous this scene must look. After a couple hours of increasing, then decreasing, then increasing, then decreasing again the cooking fire, our cake was finished and we each had a piece to enjoy. I hope to next teach them the wonders of banana bread (did I mention they have bananas here?) , brownies, perhaps chocolate chip cookies, and eventually how to make basic bread.

The activity of baking may seem trivial as a method of development, but at the heart of Peace Corps is the mission to increase human capacity through a variety of creative and innovative means. Dispersing knowledge about things such as baking, therefore, is a means to achieve this goal. Whether the students bake only occasionally but find a feeling of accomplishment in completing the task, or they continue to bake frequently and sell their products, the resulting increased knowledge and self-confidence is building capacity of local people. A Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) friend of mine in the Eastern Uganda is similarly doing things she never expected to do as a PCV--teaching clarinet and flute to Ugandan students as part of a larger effort to create East Africa's largest symphony orchestra. Like baking, the task may seem at first to be a long stretch from development work, and yet almost anyone who has participated in extra-curricular activities can attest to their worth for healthy personal development. Perhaps it no longer seems like such a stretch? In any case, the baking is a side project and soon our organization will embark on a large-scale HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention project. There is a fairly large life-skills component to the project that I hope to play a large role in. More details, of course, to come.

That's it for me here in SW Uganda. Just living with life's inconsistencies: power, water, internet all present or absent at any given time. But life is good, and I'm enjoying the adventure.

-Kobusingye Megan