Eating Nemo

Aside from all the weirdness that’s been going down lately, classes have been pretty normal. We’re still teaching at the local schools a few times a week. My classes so far have been about positive thinking and goals and ambition, concepts that aren’t really touched upon in Ugandan curriculums. We’ve also been exploring Kampala quite a bit more. And here’s one more shocking story for you all…

I ate fish! But for good reason, I swear… basically, our supervisor in Senegal emailed Natalie and I, who are both vegetarians, and was like, “ummm you guys are going to have some issues being veggie in Senegal, where every meal is made with meat or fish”. They’re going to place us in a more modern home stay where they’ll understand us not eating meat, but not eating fish there is kind of weird/mildly offensive since it’s a fishing village. So, we were both like, fine we’ll eat fish there, no big since its basically sustenance. To ease ourselves into it, we both decided to order fish and chips today when the whole group went out for lunch. Here I’m thinking, ok fish and chips will be nice, ambiguous looking fish sticks, which I used to enjoy back in the day when I still ate fish (8 years ago), so a pretty innocuous food to choose in transitioning back into eating creatures, right?

Duh, it’s Africa. SO WRONG.

They bring out the “fish and chips”. It is not fish sticks and fries in a newspaper cone like I had eaten ten years ago in London. NO. It’s an ENTIRE FISH, face and all, coated in batter and fried. WHAT THE EFF. After the initial shock, all we could really do was laugh and bravely dig in. It was kind of weird and I just blocked any mental image of this fish swimming around in Lake Victoria before making it to my plate, but I think if I was going to prepare myself for life in a fishing village, this was definitely the way to do it.

(I did cover its face with my napkin though.)