Fast Food -ish

The meat plate mostly finished

I had the chance to stop for fast food here in the Sahel. I was traveling to a far away city with some church leaders and they didn’t have time to find a proper meal. But they didn’t want to expect that the people we were visiting would feed us at in between meal times, so we stopped at a “fast food” joint in the middle of a city. On the outside it was a corner stand with a bunch of meat on spits while open flames licked them. After some debate between my companions about whether this would be acceptable for their western friend, we walked passed the flames and into the small tin/cardboard shack with a few couches and well used end tables where people rotated in to sit and eat. Flies swarmed almost as bad as the plagues in any 10-commandment movie you’ve seen. Soon we were served a stack of meat that was just piled on a platter with some sauce or powder clumped in places for dipping, and some onions spread around. Toothpicks were given to us to dip with because my hosts could tell I wasn’t going to be comfortable with the hand dipping method. I’m a meat guy, so in some ways I was intrigued to go on a South Beach diet, but I found the meat was very grisly and difficult to get down for the most part. Regardless, it was quite an experience to see what is fast and easy to eat in this culture, and what lies behind some of the simple looking street food stands. In the end, both of the churches we visited that afternoon brought out full meals to be hospitable to us anyway, so I did politely get my fill of sides as well :).

The meat stand on the left (unfortunately the flames didn't show up)
with the shack for seating behind the man in the white