Things that make me remember

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The smell of burning leaves (and garbage) here. It’s not like the smell of a campfire in your back yard, or out in the mountains. It’s kind of like you can smell and taste the dust that is being burned. Also with smells, maize being roasted on a charcoal fire. As a kid I remember hiding them in the back of the car, so when we would go for drives my brother, sister and I would pick the kernels off one by one. Since we would leave them there for so long, they would actually be like slightly soft popcorn kernels, but luckily we only had baby teeth to break.

Home made plastic bags to hold spices, nuts, popcorn… I have a very vivid memory of seeing a man in the market in Arusha with a tube of plastic adding spices to one end and then sealing it off into individual sections. Last week I saw someone doing nearly the same thing with peanuts and it really brought back a lot of childhood memories.

A coating of dust on the leaves of all the plants. It’s something you rarely see in Canada (at least the places I spend most of my time) but here it is almost everywhere. From a distance it kind of looks like things are out of focus or dry and dying. But if you walk up to them and rub the leaves, they are actually healthy looking under the film.

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