Cornerstone Church has been given the privilege to partner with the Serenje church “to look after orphans…in their distress” (James 1:24). Approximately 50 children get one meal a day along with Bible teaching. When the children arrive after school, Navice would gather them around the tables and read a Bible story in Bemba. They loved this time with Navice.
Women from the church arrive mid morning to prepare the daily meal over a charcoal fire. The meal always consists of enshima (boiled white maize) and we have a supply of 74 bags of maize harvested from the crops we planted at the Center last year.
The enshima is given a side of rape (boiled greens) and beans or kapenta (dried minnows) reconstituted in an onion and tomato sauce. The children love the kapenta, but the overwhelming smell of dead fish kept me from eating it more than once.
Sometimes fresh vegetables are purchased in the Serenje market when the supply runs low at the Hope Center. One day Navice and I went to the market on a shopping trip. The sights, sounds, and aromas of the market are a sensory delight; they never fail to accentuate the African experience.
We found that dried caterpillars were the newest item in the market—big black caterpillars with spines or white caterpillars the size of my thumb. Navice assured me that they were a delicacy, and being an entomologist I knew I would have to eat some. Kettie sautéed them in the onion and tomato sauce, then presented them for lunch. They were chewy and after eating three of each kind, I decided that I had fully captured the experience. The children were given the rest of the sautéed caterpillars and they gobbled them down.
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