Eating like a Gambian

I thought I liked spicy foods before I came to Gambia. I didn’t know what spicy food was before I came here. A Gambian person will often eat three spicy meals a day. A person will cook a big pot of rice and a big pot of spicy stew to put over the rice to eat for lunch and dinner. The stew usually has some kind of vegetable, fish, and sauce with copious amounts of pepper in it. Domodah is my favorite. Domodah is peanut (or groundnut, in local terms) paste, mashed together with fish and served over rice. Whatever the stew is, it is always cooked for hours over a fire fueled by wood or charcoal usually in an outdoor shelter usually consisting of three walls and a tin or thatched roof. I have to eat the Gambian dishes slowly because the fish are always cooked whole, which means sifting carefully through to avoid tiny bones.
People here have no problem navigating the dishes. Food is always shared large communal bowls with everyone gathered around digging in with their right hands. Everyone is able to form a perfect ball of rice and stew with their fingers and pop it in their mouths. (Thankfully) They always give the toubab a spoon. There is no such thing as waste or leftovers here. This makes sense, because refrigeration is not very common. Whatever isn’t eaten for lunch and dinner is eaten at breakfast.
Nobody eats during the day. Breakfast is in the morning, with lunch often not eaten until four or five o’clock. Instead people drink copious amounts of a strong black tea called attaya. Attaya is not only a drink, but also a ritual. Attaya requires a big platter, a pot of clean water, a pot for brewing, a small stove, plenty of sugar, two tiny cups, and the special gunpowder tea which is a green tea from China. The tea is really strongly brewed over the stove, plenty of sugar is added to the brew, and then poured into one of the cups. The man making the attaya pours the tea from cup to cup cooling the liquid and also building up a foam so that eventually both cups are filled with attaya and foam. The cups are handed out to people who are supposed to slurp down the sweet, bitter brew as quickly as possible in order to pass the cup to the next person. It’s pretty delicious.