A Taste of Home

The notable Northwest travel writer, Rick Steves, tells wanderers to pack lightly because you can enhance your joy of travel if you buy necessities locally. You can always find shampoo (necessary for Sally, not me), toothpaste, snacks and most other required items in grocery stores or pharmacies worldwide.

That said, there is something comforting about opening a cupboard and finding an American favorite after a difficult day. Peanut butter, chocolate-covered pretzels, decent red wine and cheese that doesn’t smell like a 5th grader’s toe jam are a few items that are not generally available here in Kampala. You can find a few of these items (like peanut butter, tofu, Tide detergent, etc.) but they tend to appear sporadically and when they are on the shelves, most are exorbitantly expensive.

A couple of examples – there is a local, high-end grocery store favored by expats where you can get “Beyond Meat” burgers. A single package is $70.22. I think there are 4 “burgers” in a package, so that works out to $17.55 for every delicious gravel/tofu/grass clippings/algae patty. (Rick Steves loves them, I hear.) Another store sells a medium-sized box of Tide pods for $110, when they happen to have it in stock. We buy none of these things.

But you even have to make do without things that are ubiquitous in the US. Like sour cream. Very hard to find so we use plain yogurt. No buttermilk? Just take a one cup of milk and add a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar. No rice vinegar? Use apple cider vinegar. The recipe calls for cheese? Make something else.

But creativity only goes so far. And even if you can find an item or a substitute, there is often a lot “lost in translation.” Like ice cream (terrible) and the local sausages (think “little smokies” only bigger. And uncooked. And the color of early-March, northern European belly skin) and the cheese (which smells like the Central Kitsap Junior High boy’s basketball practice jerseys).

It isn’t just food. Housewares are also poor quality, if you can find them at all. One example is a thermometer. Every 7-11, grocery store and drugstore in the US has a dozen brands and options. Not so here in the Pearl of Africa. When Sally and I came in 2021, we brought a digital one from the US but it started beeping in the middle of the night and eventually died. Sally had COVID a few months ago so I struck out into greater Kampala to find a replacement. The digital ones, when I found them were inexpensive and poor quality (didn’t ever work) so I eventually bought an old-school glass one with mercury. The kind you have to shake and leave inserted for several minutes.

I’m not sure if it was poor quality or user error, but we could not get it to work. Eventually, I put the little Chinese characters written on the side through “Google Translate” to learn that this particular model was for rectal use only. Even after closely following those instructions several times and tying it on a number of “patients”, I still couldn’t figure out how to read it, leading me to believe it was just defective. The worst thing? After all of that effort, the drugstore would not even consider taking the item back and refunding my $2.17. Unbelievable.

In the end, because we are persnickety and spoiled Americans who travel back and forth to the US regularly, we just keep a list. On our phones, “Things to Bring Back.”

Cough syrup and cough drops. Razors (my head, Sally’s legs). Chocolate (good chocolate) and really any decent sweets beyond what you could buy in an airport duty-free at a huge markup. Lime juice, because the largest limes here are smaller than a gum ball, requiring you to squeeze 1,764 to get a thimble-full of juice. I spend a lot of time in prisons and generally don’t eat the “prison lunch” provided so I bring granola bars. Mayonnaise. Paper clips and binder clips. Trader Joe’s treats are fun for parties. Small books and toys for birthdays and baby gifts. Oh, and Land Rover parts.

We could live without these items but it is amazing the joy a small thing can provide. There was a vegetable peeler in our apartment when we arrived. It immediately broke. So, we bought replacements locally. They all broke. 7 of them over the last 18 months. And when they did “work,” they were terrible. Most Ugandans peel vegetables with a very sharp knife. We don’t. In part because the Ugandan tourniquets and home suture kits are also poor quality. And also, because Sally and I both now use reading glasses. So, we splurged and bought this little beauty.

It will do the job, at least until we find a more deluxe model that also measures body temperature.