thursday night

whenever someone says the words "thursday night," i think instinctively of igisafuria.

even writing that word will forever make me think of this one time when k, s's organization's country director, once came to kibuye and joined us for igisafuria and he couldn't get the word figured out and s tapped the table with each syllable and repeated over and over "EE-gee-sa-FUriya" with four taps and the last three syllables all blended together into one syllable when really there are supposed to be six syllables in the word. we laughed really hard, approaching falling on the ground laughing, which was relatively common at igisafuriya, and for years (okay, two years now, probably) we imitated that whenever we had to tell the word to someone.

gisafuriya is a traditional casserole, made of bananas and potatoes and every potentially edible part of a goat. once we found this strange-looking soft gray twisty piece in it that we could not identify but which was either small intestine or a worm. probably a small intestine.

on thursday nights in kibuye, when i lived there, someone would order igisafuriya from the cantine, a little restaurant-ish place between the prefecture and the tennis court of the guest house. when the power was out, it was really dark in the back where the little eating huts are and even when the power was not out, it was always a bit of a game to come into the back area and find your group because the lighting was never that good. no matter what time we told them to have the gisafuriya ready, it was never ready when we got there. mostly i showed up at least half an hour after the set time and sometimes an hour. and i never touched the dish, anyway, because it was goat.

but we laughed. always, we laughed. there were nights when we laughed until my stomach still ached when i got home. n would say outrageous things. we would provoke b for fun and get him to say ridiculous, impossible medical things ("fish are plants" is the classic). i flatly forbade a to make any more speeches under threat of my leaving the table. we argued about the population of nairobi. we argued about who drove the fastest to kigali. we argued about whether the new mandatory working hours were a good idea (i thought they were preposterous - 7 am to 3:30 pm? crazy. i just continued starting my work day at 8:30).

last night was thursday night and all day yesterday i wished that there was igisafuriya, but i'm in arusha with different people and there was none. instead, we roasted a wildebeest. by which i mean a gnu. one of j's fellow soccer players went hunting last weekend and brought us some nice pieces of one of the ugliest animals ever. i don't usually eat, say, meat, but i had to try it, because it was wildebeest, after all. i can't just not try it. so i did. it was nice, as meat goes although, you know, it was meat.

so lots of people came over and ate wildebeest. it wasn't quite igisafuriya. but it was still fun.