Rwanda through food: D--Dairy Milk Chocolate and Doritos Dippas Naturel

They sell "Dairy Milk Chocolate" from Cadbury in the cafeteria, in addition to all manner of desert like items. It's so odd--I almost never have lunch desert, but here it seems like a necessity. Luckily, the Cadbury bars have a slightly different flavor; they are made in Kenya and brought in like almost everything. Rwanda has very little industry, with 80% of households surviving as subsistence farming.

A couple of my co-workers have farms outside Kigali. Actually, the person who's meeting I helped with that I mentioned last week brought me an enormous bag full of gigantic perfectly ripened avocados from his farm as a thank you for doing my job. It was way too kind; but I shared the joy with everyone else who had helped on the meeting, and our housekeeper too. I still had 6 left after giving away as many as I could. As they can't be kept too long, I pictured the vat of guacamole I would have to make--luckily all the other ingredients also grow locally (garlic, lemon/limes, onions) or are readily available (salt, cayenne).

But what to eat it with? Sure a spoon, but I would literally have pounds of the stuff (maybe even a kilo if my conversions are correct). My friend Lumbe to the rescue! At La Gallette (the German Butchery) which stocks quality meats and a number of western food items for a price, Lumbe miraculously found something called "Doritos Dippas Naturels." I had neither heard of Dippas Naturel, nor seen any tortilla chips anywhere n Kigali, and here she had found them on a random rack at the German butchery on the very day that the guac had to be made (or lose the avocados completely). Seemingly impossible, yet there they were regardless of how improbable. So for 2700 RwF (nearly $5! An outrageous spluge for the size of the bag), we feasted on Dippas and guac for dinner.

Maybe my favorite things that resulted from working on the meeting aside from the guacamole, resulted from when I was having a heart attack about some detail of the meeting that would have been virtually impossible to arrange back home with the amount of time we had left. I tried to explain as much to justify my panic and the beads of sweat popping up on my brow. My colleague calmly replied, "In Rwanda, it's possible." Indeed.