Our first FHE  (family home evening)

Going to our first FHE was a delight.  We really did not have to do anything.  Maggie Chisha one of our JoVos (Young adults) who was baptized in Sep of 2010 prepared dinner for us. She cooked Fu Fu.  Basically it is cooked white cornmeal.  After cooking it to look like Cream of Wheat cereal she just whipped it by hand with a huge wooden spoon until it thickened almost like very very thick mashed potatoes.  I tried stirring it and I was not strong enough to do what she did.  We all ate with our fingers and the meat and the sauce was pretty spicy but we all made it through the whole ordeal. The idea is to form a ball of Fu Fu and dip it into the sauce and pick up a small piece of meat or chicken and then just pop it into your mouth. Maggie did finally get Ben a fork because he was having a difficult time eating with his left hand.  I loved spending time in the kitchen with her and learning more about her and about African cooking.

Maggie grew up in the bush in Zambia and lived a very primitive life, she learned how to cook from her father who had four wives. Her mother was one of the wives but when Maggie was eleven years old her mother left her father and moved to the Netherlands with a Dutch man.  Maggie was forced to come with but her mother had to sedate her to get her on the plane.  She woke up in a loud strange place and life was very difficult for her at such a young age and the new surroundings here in this new country were very scary.  Her step father was a midwife and always told Maggie that she would never amount to anything so she decided to prove him wrong, she went to school and also became a midwife herself. She had been sending money back to Zambia to her uncle to build a training hospital so that more woman could get the right help when giving birth because apparently half the women from her village die as a result of childbirth and related issues so she wanted to change all that.  Recently her Uncle was murdered and now she is trying to find some other way to build her hospital.  The men of the village destroyed the first building that was built because they do not want women to be self sufficient or have any kind of schooling.  She asked all the JoVos to pray for her to find a way to accomplish her goal.