Food

This post is dedicated to my mother, who was worried what one can eat in Lusaka, especially if one is a picky vegetarian. She's not reading this, but she can see herself when she comes for a visit.

I actually thought that eating meat is inevitable here since there would be no choice. Well, products I can't get here include ruisleipä, dried basilica and possibly a high quality non-sticky frying pan. Products I can get here include Indian pickles, chutney, pesto, halloumi, vegetarian cutlets and sausages, olive oil, red wine, vinegar chips, marmite, tofu, ... , you get the drift. Food supply for a comfort-seeking expat comes from huge South African supermarket chains like Shoprite and Spar. They stock everything you would have in South Africa, therefore in Europe. Trucking it all overland does not come cheap, but shopping in the local markets is not really a practical choice. There's a vegetable guy bicycling to my apartment occasionally though.

Local specialities include things like termites and caterpillars, but really, what this country lives on is maize, corn, mealie-meal, nshima, ugali. White flour cooked into a sticky white chunk, that is. If Zambian hasn't eaten nshima he does not consider to have eaten at all. There's a good selection of different spinach-like greens to go with that, but a local restaurant usually have a menu of meat & nshima, chicken & nshima, and possibly, fish & nshima. Here's a picture to prove that I've tried local food, even cooked some nshima myself.

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Nshima facts:

- Zambian family can presumably consume two sacks of mealie-meal (maize flour) in a month. One sack is 25 kg.
- The price of mealie-meal has doubled in a few months to about 10 euros a sack, amounting to a Zambian equivalent of the financial crisis.
- Zambia has ample farmland and plenty of water, some say a great potential for farming even for export. The domestic supply of mealie-meal is now estimated to run out in 2 months. Next crops will be harvested in May.

Loadshedding

It’s a blog.

Loadshedding. Since there’s not quite enough electricity for everyone, ZESCO must cut down electricity from some parts of the town that others can get it. Like the Finnish compound in next street, they hardly ever lose their power. The story tells that they are at the same line with some ministers. For me the power goes down three evenings a week, usually around sunset. These times the Lusaka residents sit on their laptop in candle light starting up blogs about their highly fascinating life. Due to the rather odd leaps development sometimes takes, power cut does not mean there’s no internet connection. At least if one is using the painfully slow and expensive connection through the mobile phone network. If I sometime get a proper connection, you may access mind blowing multimedia experiences through this blog. For now all I can afford is text.

Bugs. One just crawled inside my monitor. I should have taken AppleCare, I guess. They include laptop fumigations in the package, right? I got also cockroaches in several sizes and seasonal flying termites that come swarming in wherever there’s light. Thankfully I don’t have any. The latter ones are a delicacy for all Zambians, including my borrowed cat.

Blogs. There’re many, and as a forum they’re a bit hard to follow. Many are updated very infrequently, and how is one supposed to know when to check for updates? Are they always that interesting to read, or write for that matter, I don’t know. Well let’s try, I’ll post here when there’s something that does not fit into the Facebook status update slot.

For now, go see the photos and link to me. Maybe this will turn into something. Oh, and you know what’s the hardest part about starting a blog? Naming one. Now I’m actually obliged to write something about chickens and shopping malls. What can one write about chickens and shopping malls?

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Fun facts on loadshedding:

• 20% of Zambians have access to electricity. Rest use mountains of charcoal, I’ll snap you a picture of one of those charcoal bicycles sometime.
• 75% of Zambia’s electricity is used by the copper mines. They never have powercuts, since water must be pumped from the bottom of the mine at all times.
• 100% of electricity is hydropower. More you use more environmentally friendly you are. Too bad that most people don’t have the choice to use any and new plant developments have no way to catch up with rising demand.
• ZESCO, the state power company, announced a reduction on loadshedding before the elections. Now they have announced an increase.