How to Eat with your Hands: Dinner with the Umzi’s

(The Main Course)

It is a scientific fact that eating with your hands makes food taste better. I learned this first hand at the Sustainability Institutes guest house when our friends in the Umzi student program cooked us our first real South African dinner.

It was the first night that our program coordinators left us on our own for dinner, and we were excited to get to know the South African kids that suffer through 07:30 stretches with us everyday. We spread out in the dining room and were served a steaming and delicious potato appetizer as we talked about where we come from and life in the eco-village and in the Umzi program. The students are being trained to work in the hospitality industry as chefs. One of our new friends described her hope to be a chef on a cruise ship so she can see the world while another hoped to work at a big hotel in Cape Town so she could stay close to her family. I tried and failed miserably to explain the Science, Technology, and International Affairs major, or what I would do in my life.

We lined up for the main course and were treated to a heavy plate of a white, cheesy, wheat-mash-something, sausages and braai (south african barbeque), and roasted mashed pumpkin and vegetables. This was the eat-with-your-hands food. We used our fingers as little rakes to mix and gather globs of food that were then wordlessly devoured, in between talk of our siblings and parents and significant others. They laughed at our eagerness, and we enjoyed ourselves far to thoroughly to care. There was no method or rules to the ritual, just a seemingly bottomless plate of food and a tub of hot water and napkins on stand-by. Dinner was rounded off with a pineapple upside-down cake that was to die for.

We retreated en masse to the common room where we all squeezed onto a single couch for pictures and did an ice-breaker to learn each others names. My partner for the name game had a Xhosa name, but the click that I was suppose to make in the pronunciation was completely beyond me, and past the name our introductions of each other spiraled into “she likes to dance”, “he has a pet”, and “she’s from America.” It was a lot of fun, and we never stopped laughing the whole night.

Back in the dining room, we drank tea, talked, and Alicia treated us to a little Candy Shop rapping. It wasn’t long before the Umzi kids wanted to head off to bed, as we all had an early morning to rest up for, so we said our goodbyes and they left. Our first interaction with South African students was an incredible one, we laughed, we learned, and we bonded. It was an immensely comforting experience as well, any fears that the cultural difference between South African’s and ourselves might be too great a gap to make friends or fit in were washed away with the leftover food on our hands. Abandoning our ideas of civility and maturity and using the tools that God gave us to break our bread together helped break down whatever other barriers their were between us. With the Umzi students, we weren’t American’s and South African’s, we were just a big group of kids who wanted to play with our food.