People have got issues! Trust issues. These people do not trust their house helps or domestic servants or housekeepers or maids, whatever you’d like to call them.

But why hire someone to cook for you and keep house and run your errands if you do not trust them?

It’s because of this distrust that whenever these people want to send their kadogos, as they are commonly called, on shopping errands, an elaborate list of items to be bought has to be drawn, complete with prices for each item!

1.Poivron – Rwf 5002.Celery – Rwf 2003.Fromage –Rwf 1,0004.Maggi –Rw f 1505.Indimu – Rwf 3006.Tanzanian rice–Rwf 1,000

Speaking of Tanzanian rice, what use is rice if it’s not Tanzanian? It’s the reason I generally do not do hotel rice in particular and hotel food in general. Don’t even start to tell me about Pakistan and Basmati and Sushi and Risotto and Red rice because all that is not rice.

And why are people in such a rush while cooking rice, leaving it to simmer violently like school food?

Rice needs to steam, not cook. To steam rice, you need low heat as opposed to a mini inferno.

Getting back to the subject at hand –some queer people have learnt to distrust their house helps to the extent they have to jot down a shopping list as seen above whenever the home kitchen needs to be replenished, then going through the shopping once the kadogo returns – some kind of audit.

Celery: They don’t want the kadogo to short change them by buying celery for Rwf 50 when the clear order was for celery worth Rwf 100.

Speaking of celery, I know quite a few things about this super food. The endangered Mountain Gorillas in the Volcanoes National Park and Virunga Massif love it as much as we do, if not more. In fact, if you want to pass a death sentence for a gorilla, just deny it this treat.

However the celery that these apes eat is of the bushman variety. It is tough as Kevlar, chewy and with jagged-edged shoots.

Poivron: I know many of you are lost because you are encountering the word for your very first time. But relax … poivron is green pepper in another language. I would have called it the name everybody around here identifies with –Puwavuro, but if you have any sense of phonetics, then it should by now have downed on you that puwavuro and poivron are one and the same.

But puwavuro sounds crude, doesn’t it? Same apples to celery when people choose to call it serere.

Indimu: Indimu reminds me of an ex-flame who had some Kenyan connection. So whenever we went out to drink and smoke (we never went out to eat), the waiters always knew what to serve her before hand and so would never bother with shoving a drinks menu before her.

Whenever we came around, the wait staff always knew who of us would be served ‘Uganda Wa + indimu. For the uninitiated, ‘Uganda Wa’ is Uganda Waragi, and apparently Kenyans love it more than the Ugandans that distill it.