The Harrowing Adventures of Tim and the Refectory Food

For reasons unknown to me I decided to take on a food challenge; to eat every meal for one week with my students in the refectory.

Parameters:

—I can only eat what students are served during meals (they aren’t served snacks)

—I can drink all the water I want without limit.

—I can continue to take vitamin pills but I have to switch from my delicious adult vitamin gummies to the nasty prenatal vitamins provided by Peace Corps.

Here’s what went down.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Breakfast

I made a roaring start to the week by skipping out on breakfast because I spent Sunday night watching Dexter late into the night and imagining myself in cooler climates while I boiled inside my sweatpants from the consumption of copious amounts of hot chocolate and the balmy 80 degree Rwandan night time temperature. In lieu of what would have been bland porridge I received an extra hour and a half of sleep. Not bad recompense in my eyes.

Lunch

I was hungry. I had my fork. I had my ambiguously shaped plate/bowl. I was ready for lunch. Today’s lunch consisted of beans and giant corn kernels that could bruise a Clydesdale if thrown with enough vigor. Mixed together with a wondrous blend of apathy and indifference we waited with baited breath while one student filled our plates/bowls from the basin filled with today’s lunch. Teachers have been served this kind of food before but I was assured by the students that it’s necessary to have good teeth beforehand lest you lose one by mistaking a rock for a kernel. I get rocks occasionally in the teachers’ food but something tells me cooking for 700-800 students leaves more possibility for rocks to enter their caloric intake than for 25-30 teachers and staff.

Dinner

Famished, I paced around my bedroom for a half hour waiting for the refectory to open. It was raining with the ferocity of a storm in Mordor so things got delayed a little while. I debated with myself whether or not to skip out on dinner but something (mostly hunger) told me I probably shouldn’t, though it wouldn’t have mattered much since I left dinner feeling hungrier than when I started. Beans and sweet potatoes. And salt. Lots of salt. The beans were so salty that each forkful found microscopic abrasions on my lips to torment. I dared not eat the sweet potatoes because even at their best (during thanksgiving with buckets of marshmallows drizzled on them) I think they’re an abomination to food. The sweet potatoes in Rwanda also scare me with the general lack of color and then mysterious black pits of nothingness randomly dispersed throughout its bland, flavorless body. With an unsatisfied full belly, thus concludes Day 1.