Cultural Exchange

As you can tell from all of my previous posts, I've been having a great time in Rwanda for the last 10 weeks.  It’s been a real adventure, and I've learned a lot about Rwandan culture along the way.  Between going to weddings, attending church services, being surrounded by the local music and a new language, and eating nothing but Rwandan food, I've been totally immersed.  And because I've enjoyed my time with my friends here so much, I've been trying to give a little something back.

American culture is, as in much of the world, pretty pervasive here.  Lots of our music and movies are exported to East Africa, and most of the young people here seem to know a lot more about our celebrities than I do.  And although many of the same singers and actors are idolized in both countries, I can’t help but feel that Reality TV shows, Snoop Dogg, and even Celine Dion (who continues to be massively popular here, for some reason) don’t really represent the American culture that I know.  Sure, those figures are a part of our American culture (never mind that Celine Dion is Canadian), but they’re small parts that are overrepresented here, with the effect that my Rwandan friends only know about those aspects.

Football!

So I decided to share a little bit of the culture that they don’t get exposed to here.  And what is more American than football and bacon?  Luckily I had a few old Michigan football games saved on my hard drive (you never know when they’ll come in handy!), so I asked around and found that there was a ton of interest in seeing them.  Once I showed a few people, I got even more requests.  I think the entire village is hooked on American football now – I must have watched the same three games four or five times a piece over the course of the summer!

Thanks, Mr. Butcher!

The bacon idea was a little trickier.  Rwandan food is mostly based on potatoes, bananas, beans, and assorted vegetables.  Occasionally you’ll see some beef, but I hadn’t eaten any pork since I’d been here.  So I had to make a trip down to the village center on market day to pay a visit to the local butcher.  Each butcher usually kills one animal per day, and unfortunately the first shop I stopped by was slaughtering a cow.  But as luck would have it, the guy next door was about to prepare a pig, so I quickly put in my bid for the belly.  It took a little explaining, since the animals here aren’t really divided into cuts of meat like in the US, but rather just cut apart and sold by weight.  But after some gesticulating and pantomiming, I ended up with 7 pounds of pork belly, ready to be cooked.

Excited about eating a pig

With 7 pounds of meat, I had enough to make two meals.  So I began with a pork belly roast even though it wasn’t part of my original plan.  I managed to scrounge up some salt, sugar, and vinegar to marinate it, and aside from the oven not being hot enough to crisp up the skin, it turned out pretty well!  Meat isn’t roasted here, but is usually just cut into small chunks and sautéed, so it was a new experience for my Rwandan family.  But after that meal, my thoughts returned to bacon.  I decided to cure the remaining pork belly with the same salt/sugar mixture, and I added some local honey as well to make a sweeter bacon.  I searched for days for black pepper to complete the mixture, but nobody in the village had ever heard of it.  I was lucky again though, and managed to find a mostly empty bottle of ground pepper at kitchen of the local church.  With the final ingredient in hand, I combined everything in the fridge and waited a week. 

Something Resembling an American Breakfast

Everyone Loves American Food!

In the end, I couldn’t set up a smoker to put the finishing touches on the mean, so we had to settle for green bacon.  But with a few added accoutrements in the form of hash browns, scrambled eggs, and pancakes, it proved to be quite a success!  

If I’ve accomplished nothing else this summer, I’ve definitely converted some of my friends here into lovers of bacon and football.  And that, I think, is what cultural exchange is really all about.