Eating like an Ethiopian

I may have told you this before, but when I was a kid my family sat around the supper table every night to eat together.  Just like a Norman Rockwell painting. The thing that Mr. Rockwell forgot though, when capturing the middle-America typical family, was that the TV was on at supper time. And the program on the TV was the nightly news. It seemed that every night there was news from Vietnam and later on from Watergate. It also seemed like the famine in Ethiopia was covered every night as well.

I did some online research and that famine in Ethiopia really did not last throughout my entire childhood (like the Vietnam War did). But it was those pictures of starving children in Africa, their bellies huge, their arms and legs sticks, their eyes vacant, that made me decide way back then that someday I would go to a third world country and make a difference.

Who knew how that would all end up? You know where it all ended for me during this last trip to Kenya? In an Ethiopian restaurant.

Apparently Ethiopian food is very popular. I always pictured Ethiopians eating little besides rice or gruel. But they serve a variety of dishes, the most common being several different items plopped onto injera, the spongy-looking, pancake-like flatbread which they use to scoop up their food.

I’ve had worse food, I’ve had better. The important thing isn’t what you eat as much as who you eat it with.