I’m just back from lunch with my friend E. — Mama (of) Moses. I went there with Katie, Jackson and Matthew the weekend of 14 Falls (for which my stomach is still paying) and she served us lovely steamed cabbage which was crisp and had a fresh taste, unsullied with cooking oil which often seems to happen here. We all said how much we liked it.
A while after that Mama Moses came to my house and told me how, on the evening of our visit, her three boys Moses, T. and P. came home and refused to eat the cabbage she had cooked for them. I should qualify that cabbage, in this case, was neither the sole substance of the meal, nor an accompanying vegetable. The meal we ate was Chapati and Cabbage, Moses, had he partaken of the lovely veg, might have said he was eating chapait and only mentioned the cabbage as the chapati’s “escort”. But he didn’t.
So, the story continues today:
“You remember when I told you my boys refused to eat that cabbage?”, E. asked me (She prnounces ‘and’ as ‘andy’ and ‘then’ as ‘thenny’, etc).
I nodded.
“I came back here and I asked them ‘Who is the boss here?’, and they told me, ‘It’s you’; then I kept quiet.”
I regarded her expectantly.
“Then I bought cabbage here and we ate every day for one week, every meal.” she said, brightly.
“You cooked cabbage for them every day?”, I asked, trying to get a handle on what I was being told. Sometimes I don’t follow her because her English is odd, sometimes because of her pronunciation and, sometimes, because the stories she is telling are just so weird that it takes a second telling to make sure I believe her.
“No! I digged the shamba every day, they come here; and if they want food, there is food: cabbage for every meal”.
So it was true, she’d fed her kids cabbage for every meal for a week to show them she was the boss. Gotta admire her tennacity.
“Then”, she continued (and remember her odd pronounciation), “My Moses said to me ‘Mum, you are not serious! We don’t have to eat the same thing every day, we’re not in Sudan!'”.