The rainy season has begun, and you know what that means, all you can eat white ants!

Looks good doesnt it? Actually this was the tastiest meal my neighbors have prepared for me yet. This particular meal consisted of freshly caught white ants, fried and salted, and fried Matoke, which is basically a less sweet banana. I'd heard about the white ants and wanted to give them a try but i was pretty surprised when they gave me a whole bowl full, i just wanted to taste one. I was even more surprised at how delicious they were, although i really shouldnt be, you can't go wrong with oil and salt. They taste kind of nutty and have the texture of a really crispy french fry with the skin on it. I finished off the plate and wanted more. I've had more since but a different species that is smaller and gritty, ill pass on those from now on, i've become a white an snob! 

The rain forces the termites/white ants up from under ground and out of their mounds, they fly towards the lights and into the nets and buckets of hungry Ugandans. There are 4 species here and the gathering tactic is different for each. My favorite is when they use clay to form tubes from the openings in the mound down to a bucket. They pound the ground with sticks to scare them up and the termites walk right into the buckets.

The staple food here is Bwitta or Posho when there inst money and rice and beans when there is, so mostly the former. Bwitta and Posho are just millet and maize flour respectively that has been mixed with boiling water until it has a play-dough-like consistency. It goes without saying that it's really bland, but with a little sauce to dip in and a lot of hunger it does satisfy. I feel a little guilty eating nicer food, especially the packaged rice i recently bought at an Indian supermarket in the nearest big town, Mbale. It costs three times as much as the unprocessed rice, but it has no husks or stones in it. I have a bit of a pile of packaging building up in my house because im self conscious about throwing it all out and revealing what Ive been buying with my fat American dollars. They know to go through Muzungu's trash here, and not without good reason, we're used to tossing things that are perfectly usable or fixable, more on that later. So it can take a long time to sort through the raw rice and pick out all the crap, and since everything seems to take forever here, efficiency at home is the name of the game right now. I got a pressure cooker that cuts the cooking time of dry beans down from an hour and a half to twenty five minutes. Throw in some rice when the bean are almost done, and I have a complete protein meal in twenty five minutes. Add some avocado and MSG and its not bad, and there's only one pot to clean! Hurray for bachelor chow! So, that's pretty much the biggest news in my life right now.