The pineapple here is excellent! It's sweet, juicy, and has a lot of taste. We've also had lots of watermelon, but it hasn't been constantly as good. Most of the time it's just OK. We've also had lots of bananas (as a fruit). They have at least three different kind of bananas:regular (yellow bananas), green bananas (which is used to make matoke), and little bananas (larger than platanos dominicos in Mexico). There's also papaya, but we don't like it :). There are no citrus so we generally are served passion fruit juice and pineapple juice. The former is OK, a bit sour and without a lot of volume.
Uganda has two dry seasons and two rainy seasons. This is the end of the first dry season. The rain will start soon, and the second dry season will come in July, August, September. Now (the end of the dry season) is when bananas get harvested. While traveling we've seen lots of bananas being transported. Most farms are small plots, held by individuals, which used them for subsistence farming. They sometimes plant crops for sale, of which bananas seem to be a favorite. After harvesting the bananas, the farmer takes them (on a bicycle) to a collection spot where trucks come to pick them up.
Bicycles get used as general purpose "trucks". It's not unusual to see a bicycle loaded with bananas, plastic containers with water, coal, etc. The bikes look heavy (or solid) and are mostly (always?) fixed-gear. Which makes sense, as gearing has a much smaller lifespan. Though gears
would be useful as Uganda is a hilly country. Most often riders dismount when going uphill and then cruise downhill.
Anyway, back to food. There are lots of goats and some cows. The goats and the cattle are small, though the bulls have huge horns! Most people, however, subsist on what they farm. The south-western district (near Rwanda) is heavily over-populated, and every inch of soil is cultivated. It is a hilly region, which has led to erosion. It is only recently that terraced farming was introduced. If this is what Rwanda was like before the genocide, it's easy to see how it turned into a tinderbox.
Most of the farming seems to be done by women, sometimes with the help of children. Small boys seems to take care of goats, and older (teenage) boys take care of cattle. We don't know what most men do. Some help with farming or with cattle. But mostly it seems to be women and children.
Kampala has a large foreign population; Asians (i.e. Indians), Europeans (we think most work with NGO's), and Chinese, and other Africans (mostly Ethiopians and Sudanese). Indians have been here the longest (though Idi Amin kicked them out in 1973 not all chose to go) and so have most influenced the local food culture. Pretty much everywhere we go there are various Indian options on the menu, and chapatis and rotis are everywhere (though I doubt our Indian friends would recognize them as such). We went to two truly excellent Indian restaurants in Kampala. One was high-end and one was a simply chaat house. But we really liked both. Coincidentally, Indians also seem to dominate the economy. Most of the successful businesses are run by Indians.
At Bushara camp we were even served tasty Mexican food; we had flour tortillas (which are a lot like chapatis), guacamole, salsa. They were really tasty and pretty close to the original (this must be the Canadian influence). Ugandans seems to like the mixture, but have a preference for their local food (i.e. matoke).
We are routinely offered meat (beef, pork, chicken, goat), though Ugandans don't seem to eat much of eat. My feeling is their traditional diet is poor in proteins, which is being addressed by having more beans.
R
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