While in Sudan, two times I found myself at a restaurant wishing I was eating back at our Sudanese kitchen. Most of the food we ate at our kitchen was basic and unpleasant but it was safe, nonetheless. Rather, at the two restaurants, safety was not something I felt covering me like a warm blanket. Both times we ate out at a restaurant I felt vulnerable, each in different ways.
The second time, we went into the city market and found a busy little grill. There was a cooked chicken sitting on display. Flies buzzed about the chicken. The market streets were busy. People buzzed about like flies. There were a few people working the grill as the African sun began to hang low in the western sky. We talked with the cooks long enough for them to understand we wanted to eat. Openings in the tin shack walls provided a doorway to tables inside. I took one last look at the hazy horizon before stepping inside. It had been a beautiful evening as the smog and dust of the horizon smeared the hot orange glow of the sun.
Inside the restaurant shack we found a small table with plastic chairs. We sat down. There was a television perched on a tilting shelf in the corner. The TV was emitting a humming noise almost as loud as the actual movie playing. Because there are no TV stations in South Sudan, the TV was hooked up to a DVD player which ran a movie straight out of the 80's. It was unclear whether the movie was made in the U.S. or Japan. There was Karate and there was Kung Fu but everyone was Caucasian.
The movie was so painfully awful that I stood up to go get a soda. I opened up the freezer on the dirt floor to grab an orange Fanta. The label was written in Arabic. Since the city had no electricity, the restaurant bought time to plug in their freezer into a generator. Unfortunately, the generator only runs for a few hours each day so the soda never gets cold. Once in a while, a person can get lucky if he or she is willing to dig to the bottom. I dug through the sodas in search of a cold one. I didn't get lucky that night.
I sat back down at the table and we ordered our food when a boy came to our table. Come to think of it, we never actually had a menu to order from. We just tried to say that we wanted a chicken like the one we saw on display. The boy looked confused so he brought us a dish of what was on the grill. It wasn't chicken. I think it was pork but it came with little pita bread tortillas. We eventually convinced the boy to bring us some chicken as well.
When the chicken arrived, I looked for the silverware. None to be found. I looked around at the other tables. No silverware. Everyone was eating with their hands. It was obvious that the four of us, Americans, were all thinking about silverware. Just then, the boy handed us a bowl of water. The three others must have been through this before because they knew what to do; rinse their hands. Dipping our hands in the bowl and rubbing them together might have washed a little dirt off but we had spent the entire day in the village, greeting strangers, and working in the dirt. I hadn't washed all the dirt off my hands in 24 hours. We all knew the water bowl was insufficient cleansing but it was all we had.
The prayer that followed to bless the food to our bodies was prayed in the most literal sense. Pat explicitly prayed that we would not get sick from the food. It was a simple request and a simple prayer. We didn't hesitate to eat with our hands after the concluding, "amen." We all had faith God heard our prayer. God allowed us to eat boldly even when all logic said we should get sick. I took the little pita bread and used it like a oven mitt to pick up and eat the meat. It was delicious.
After finishing our meal and leaving the restaurant, we walked away from the lights of the market into the darkness of the village. There were no street lights and no starlight. The darkness was thick and full. People walking all around us became noticeable only by the sound of footsteps. When a motorcycle or truck came down the road, pedestrians appeared in front of us, staggered in layers of silhouettes. The shadows of all the people started long and swung away from the headlights as the cars passed by. I thought about the meal I had just eaten and wondered if I had just ingested something to make me sick. I considered it a good sign when I did not vomit immediately after eating.
I decided it boiled down to a simple prayer offered in faith. We had no soap, no silverware, but we had trust that God would keep us from getting sick. We believed he would protect us- and he did. "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
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