Lunchtime!

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Here is a version of the meal we have been eating every lunchtime for 15 months. The choice is between overcooked rice and lentils, overcooked rice and beans, and potatoes accompanied by an anonymous, ochre, boiled-beyond-recognition vegetable mush. Maman Espe may be a heroine, but she is certainly no cook.

It’s entirely our own fault, of course. When we first got here, we thought we’d indulge in a maid two or three times per week. Enter Maman Espe, who tearfully begged us to let her come every day in exchange for a 33% increase in salary. In order to justify a daily presence, both to her and to ourselves, we asked her to prepare lunch every day. Decent lunchtime eateries, where you can quickly grab a sandwich or salad for a few bucks, are few and far between in Kinshasa, so we rightly concluded that it would be far easier to come home each day. But we forgot a key element: we forgot to test Espe’s cooking skills.

Since then, every day at about 11am, as the first pangs of hunger make themselves felt, I groan inwardly at the idea of ingesting yet another tasteless blend. By 1 or 2pm, when starvation finally gets the better of me, I drag myself home apathetically to find an equally unenthusiastic Fred staring doggedly at his plate. The truth is, once we are sufficiently hungry and with the help of an impressive array of condiments, we just about manage anything. It’s not so much that Espe’s dishes are so dreadfully bad, it’s the sheer repetition which we find untenable.

You’d think that by now one of us would have taken the time to teach her a few basics.