Food and the Market

We have been very fortunate in Cameroon so far as there is a cook assigned to us who has been cooking most of our meals. I found that one of the most unexpected gifts for me during our months home in the States this past summer was that I wasn’t obsessed with thinking about food. Even though the food was plentiful in Guatemala and there was a lot of variety, there were no grocery stores in Santiago, some items were only available on certain days of the week or only if one got to the market early, and some items were scarce and/or expensive, for example, cheese and peanut butter. I did careful meal planning and a little rationing (my family would call it hoarding) of special foods. It ended up that I spent a good part of my days thinking about, buying, and preparing food in Guatemala.

So, here in Cameroon, even though I will be able to ease into 

the meal preparation, I did want to see what the market had to offer. There are tomatoes, onions, carrots, okra, garden eggs (a small form of eggplant), and bananas available daily. At times, I have seen green peppers, celery, green beans, potatoes, yams, avocados, and pineapple. There is bread, rice, pasta, black beans, pinto beans, soy beans, and dried fish, plus eggs, flour, oil, vinegar, and salt. Dried corn which is ground into corn flour and made into corn fufu is plentiful as corn fufu is the food that everyone eats daily. The market day is every 8th day and on those days the market also sells fabric and new and used clothing and shoes. I saw tomato paste in sachets and canned sardines. There is groundnut paste (passable for peanut butter), Ovaltine, milk powder, and something similar to Nutella, which has been a sweet treat. Only live chickens are available. We’ve received homemade cheese as a gift from one of the sisters at the convent and that has been a treat.