Musoma Market

Although some people find the busy market intimidating, I love shopping for fruits and vegetables in Musoma! If you like farmers' markets with stands spilling over with produce, you'd enjoy our town market here. It might not rival Costco or Safeway for variety, but I think it holds its own if you're comparing prices. Green peppers at about seven cents apiece? Tomatoes for around 50 cents a pound? A pineapple for just over one dollar? Not bad! However, eggs go for about two dollars a dozen and sugar for 65 cents a pound, so not everything is too different in price from the States. Also, if you want something a bit out of the ordinary (meaning, not locally grown), you're out of luck.

Most stands have the same things, so it can be difficult to decide from whom to buy. There are a few sellers that I tend to frequent, simply because I've gotten to know them a bit. True, the man from whom I buy my cabbages often has better cabbages than others, but really, I just like buying my cabbage from him. He knows I like the smaller, cleaner ones and picks me out a good one. And the man from whom I buy bananas knows I like ones that are still mostly green, and that if he and I don't have the correct change between us to make it come out even, I'll be back next week and we'll even up then.

I also buy cat food at the market. Clive and Betsy eat dried little fish called 'dagaa', which is sold by the pile. I take a Tupperware with me and have the woman selling it scoop the fish right into the container. How the lid seals so tightly mystifies her, I think! But those little fish stink, let me tell you, so I keep it in the freezer in the Tupperware. Dagaa is a staple protein of Tanzanians, since it's pretty inexpensive, even by Tanzanian standards. I am too embarrassed to tell her that I feed the dagaa to cats - the seller probably things I'm just one of the few Americans that actually likes to eat it. However, dagaa is one food here that I just cannot bring myself to enjoy. But it's great cat food.

So, after I load up my basket and bring all of this produce home, the next job is to wash all the fruits and veggies. I scrub them under running water and then lay them out to dry on a towel. However, since the water here is not safe to drink, the vegetables are not safe to eat until they have completely dried. It's really important to wash them well, but almost even more important to dry them well. For things that will be boiled before eating, like green beans, I don't wash those. But the pineapple, mangoes, bananas, passion fruit, and papaya that get put into tropical fruit smoothies have to be scrubbed and dried before I cut them up and blend them into a fabulously refreshing drink. And, after a hot day here, there's nothing like cold, semi-frozen fruit whipped into a smoothie!