A couple weeks ago an afternoon wind storm blew dozens of mangoes out of the trees and instead of saving them for the kids I decided to horde them for myself so I could make a batch of mango sorbet.
That is A LOT of mango puree, people.
Molly stirs the simple syrup.
high school girls eat at the baby table
Agnes Apai with her popcorn, cookies, and cup of ice cream.
older boys
scarce left-overs
Approximately 100 mangoes, one week, and 15 hours of cutting and mashing later we had eight containers of sorbet, which was more than enough for all of the kids, cooks, cleaners, and house-mothers to have a big scoop of frozen fruit juice. Last Saturday we celebrated birthdays for all the kids born in January, February, March and April - we gave them sorbet, popcorn, cookies and candy and it was the most excited I'd seen them since Christmas. Dare I say they were like kids in a candy store to the extreme?
Throughout the morning the older kids came to me and asked if I could tell them their birthdate from my list. (Most of them don't know their birthdates because when you're born in a mud hut in the African bush papers like calendars and birth certificates don't exist.) The littlest kids would run up to me and simply shout, "MELLY! ICE KEEM?! ICE KEEM?!" YES! Ice keem! In Sudan!
During the many hours I spent in the kitchen slicing mangoes I thought about how ice cream is a true luxury. It's not necessary to sustain life and many nutritionists (and moms) would argue that the less ice cream consumed the better. Electricity, the mechanism needed to freeze liquid in a tropical climate, is often as rare as, well, ice in the desert. Even in places where electricity exists, like this town in Sudan, most people could never afford a freezer. A freezer to preserve food and make ice is the equivalent of an American owning a vacation house: quite nice but unnecessary. No one needs ice or frozen pizzas or that bag of peas covered in freezer-burn or the top of year-old wedding cake.
But a scoop of sorbet certainly is nice during a birthday party on a hot, African afternoon.
Here's to simple luxuries and birthday celebrations for orphans.
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