Viewpoints

In our CHE lessons, there is one on Worldviews. It explains that people all have a worldview - the way they view and interpret the world around them. This is influenced by culture, gender, traditions, and many other things - both positive and negative, true and false. Many times we do not even know the foundations that shape our worldviews, we just take them for granted.

Our friend, Jacob Ouma, was over the other day asking about life in America. One thing he asked was whether you could get ugali in the US. Ugali is a staple of the Kenyan diet. It is a starch made from mixing cornmeal with water, cooking until it is somewhere between dough and bread. Once prepared, it is served with fried greens, meat/beans, and other veggies. You then form small portions of the ugali into balls, flatten, and use it to "scoop up" the other portions of the meal. It can be found in many other African countries, called by different names, maybe derived from another source like cassava.

I explained to Jacob that you can get ugali flour (cornmeal) in America, but people don't make ugali. You can't buy it at a corner shop/restaurant. The average American would not know what it was if you asked them. I don't know that my explanation really surprised him. He simply asked me what the staple food in America is.

This is where my own worldview was challenged. What is America's staple food? There are those that we might call "traditional," but we don't have a food, like ugali, that we eat for all meals. But it wasn't this that struck me. Kenyans eat ugali each meal because it is cheap, readily available. This is what they can afford. For us as Americans, we have disposable income and this is even represented in our great variety of meals.

While I don't know if this totally reflects worldview, it makes me contemplate those things in Kenyan culture that are different from American culture a bit more. In this case, it may not be that Kenyans LOVE ugali and thus eat it all the time. They eat it all the time out of necessity and thus most have come to love ugali, unable to imagine life without it.

Thank you for reading my ramblings of the day.