Mostly about food...

 When we first saw our house here, two
weeks before we moved in, the kitchen was absolutely bare---no
furniture or appliances, only a concrete floor and a few shelves
attached to the wall. Our school then had a sink installed and gave
us a two-burner gas cooker, a table to set it on, and a tank of
propane. They also gave us a starter kitchen set: two plastic
plates, two spoons, two aluminum pots, a wooden spoon, two mugs, and
several buckets filled with water. Such riches! (And, I am not being
sarcastic).

Yesterday, we decided to splurge and buy half a kilo of ground beef,
which we ate with spaghetti sauce for lunch and dinner. It's a
splurge because it is hard to have perishables on hand without
refrigeration.  Our small town's general store offers frozen ground beef,
stew meat, and whole chickens. There are one or two butchers in town,
but I haven't been brave enough to shop in them. They have slabs of
meat hung in the open from hooks in the ceiling, exposed to flies and
everything else.

The cookbook the Peace Corps gave us gives detailed instructions on
how to kill, pluck, and butcher a chicken. I haven't been brave
enough to do that, either, and I think I would rather live on peanut
butter than do so.

Actually, we do eat a lot of peanut butter. Peanuts are grown in
abundance here. We also eat rice, beans, eggs, fruit, and vegetables.
We shop at the produce market almost every day, and so most of what
we eat is absolutely fresh. It is also cheap. Processed and imported
foods are of course expensive. We bought a small can of tuna in
Arusha last week that cost 3300 shillingi--a little over $2. That's
about third of the daily living allowance the Peace Corps provides
each volunteer. We're saving the tuna for a special occasion.