Let's eat...carbs.

When I woke up this morning, I heard a disturbing sound! I said, when I woke up this morning, I heard a disturbing sound! What I heard was the knock knock of my counterpart, Lawyer on my front door. He came early enough yet again to wake me up yet again. 6:30.

I ran through the food options for breakfast. I had leftover popcorn from the night before. My family makes wosa wosa, a local food that's kind of hard to describe, but it's yam based, full of carbs. It's usually my go-to, but it's lost some steam in recent days due to overcoming the worst diarrhea of my life, in which I've lost some trust in local food. Yes, once an hour during the day and three times a night for about two and a half days. It's like someone poisoned you! Thank God for oral rehydration salts. It was more bonding time with my latrine. It has a concrete floor with a circular hole and a rectangular area cut out to catch urine. A synonym for it would be an outhouse, but you walk in and there's just this hole in the floor. With all of the trips out to it, my family and neighbors became genuinely concerned. “Why won't you take drugs?!” “You have to stop drinking water. It goes too fast!”

So back to the food search. My food stock at home was running a bit low, but I have enough gifted yams to last two weeks should there be a zombie apocalypse (but enough water to last three baf-less days). The other street food out there is plain rice with stew, more carbs. Another is fried yams with stew – carbs. Or you can do fried yams with beans – carbs and a little bit of protein that's one of my favorites as long as the beans are fresh. Then there's waakye, another guaranteed favorite. Waakye is rice and beans, like what you eat in a burrito, also carbs. I could probably find kenke, which is this corn mush stuff a lot like oversized tamales that are even wrapped the same way. Except the fillings in tamales make them better. I subconsciously rotate this selection so I don't become tired of these limited carbohydrate enriched options. But today, none of this seemed appealing to me, but fruit did. Do we have fruit? No, not for miles in every direction, and this is supposed to be the harvest. I hate getting these wishful cravings.

This fruit craving made me miss how wonderful America is, where everyone has easy access to affordable fruit and vegetables. It's like we have a God-given right to fruit and vegetables – even if they're grown thousands of miles away! That's 'Merica!

PCVs joke that we're going to make the worst parents, or judgmental and unpleasant people to be around when we go back home. “Eat your vegetables! There's starving and kwashiorkor children in Africa!” Or, at a fancy steakhouse, “What, you're not going to finish that steak? That cow died for us! Let me finish it for you, gluttonous bastard.” Or just openly talk about bowel movements, like I did here.

Here's my attempt at a moving message: we live in a very unfair world. Much of the developed world doesn't know what they're missing, and most of the undeveloped world doesn't know anything other than rice and beans, no fruit. It can be strange living in the middle. I ate the leftover popcorn.