Luo dancing girls

One of the nightwatchmen and I prepared a pan-African meal for all of the guards on duty. By that I mean we used local ingredients to try to recreate a typical Ghanaian meal of banku, tilapia and a fresh hot pepper sauce and shito. Of course there were modifications. We used Kenyan ugali instead of banku (both are made from cornflour but ugali is much harder than banku and banku is lightly fermented whereas ugali is not.) The tilapia we got from a Luo lady at the fish market in town. The Luo are a tribe that live on the shores of Lake Victoria and, according to the nightwatchmen, have the best tilapia in the world. The hot pepper sauce was intact but with a fraction of the pepper a Ghanaian would use. There was no shito to be found - shito is a hoooooot pepper paste made of dried baby shrimps and hoooooot peppers.

The guards couldn't stomach the thought of a fresh pepper sauce with plain fried fish so we fried the fish then fried the fish again in the fresh pepper sauce. They reserved a fraction of the fresh pepper sauce to try on the side. All of this was prepared in the communal kitchen while blasting Ghanaian hiplife from my iPhone to create the atmosphere. The overall result was a meal somewhere in between what we would both eat normally but incredibly tasty and fun.

The most enduring part of the meal is the slow-cooker friendship between me and the nightwatchmen. He was orphaned after his family died in a road traffic accident and lived off the kindness of strangers until he started a family of his own. He now has four children plus an orphaned boy he and his wife care for. The stories continued with heroic feats of killing a (?dead) lion, and tragedy after suffering a vicious attack while on duty that literally left him speechless for a year.

A few days after our feast, the nightwatchmen brought me a cd of traditional Luo music and asked if I would come to meet his family at their home in Langas, a slum outside of Eldoret. That weekend we boarded a matatu (local public transport van) with a bag of groceries in hand and took the 15 minute drive to his house. I was greeted by about twenty kids under the age of eight who had come to see the mizungo (foreigner). His wife recreated our panafrican meal, I was soooo touched. After lunch and some hairpulling (the little girls wanted to see if my hair was attached to my head and wanted to keep a strand each as a souvenir) the kids taught me how to dance to traditional Luo music in the street. It's one of the best weekends I've had so far.