Food

I've had a couple of questions about food/preparing meals, so I will attempt to answer them here. As I have said before, there is a severe lack of variety. This is due to three factors: food is expensive, 70% is imported, and culturally there is a preference for simple diets. At my training site, breakfast (kacitari in Pulaar) was usually sour milk, bread, tea, and leftovers from the night before. Lunch (botari) was always rice and fish with veggies. Dinner (kirtari) was usually either rice with a little meat scraps or maccaroni with a little meat scraps. Dinner is the only one where there was any variation and even then, not much.

At my site it will be important to find a family to eat with for a number of reasons. First, sharing meals is tentament in Mauritanian culture, so much so that it is basically requried to establish a relationship with anyone. Second, there is no refregiration to speak of so everything must be bought fresh. Also for similar reasons of lack of cooking equipment, the process of preparing food is much more difficult. If I decided to cook all of my meals for myself, I could easily spend half of everyday just on food prep. At my training site thats exactly what one of my sisters did. (and she had help!) I think this might be one of those differences that doesn't fully translate via text, you have to experience it to really understand. Its similar to Amish have to prepare meals in a way but much more difficult.