Meals on Wheels

The month of Ramadan began the end of May and ended the 25th of June.  Since this month includes fasting from sunrise to sunset, the University closed it's cafeteria where the noon meal can be purchased for 15 cents per student.  Normally the streets are lined with women cooking and selling food, but during this month the streets were empty of the "fast food" options as well.

To make matters worse, it is the end of the school year which means lots of exams and extra pressure.  As we began to think about our Christian students and how to help them, Tom came up with the idea of making sandwiches for them each day.   As we asked our students about it, they came up with only 2 sandwich options:  ground beef and omelette.  And so began 15 days of sandwich making (weekends they were on their own!)

We made between 32 and 40 sandwiches per day, depending on what we "guess-timated" the crowd to be.

Tom's job was to walk down to the local bakery and buy the bread.  Each loaf made 2 sandwiches.

 The omelettes  included lots of onions, green peppers, garlic and tomatoes, if available.  So cutting up the veggies took a bit of time each day.

 On the "omelette" days, Saratou, fellow staff member, came to help.  On the "meat" days I could manage by myself.

 Cracking eggs, cutting up the vegetables, cutting the bread open and spreading on the mayonnaise  were the first steps before cooking the eggs.  

Obviously, they were more like scrambled eggs than omelettes.

Then we wrapped them individually and they were ready to go to campus.

We had informed the students that they could find our pickup under a tree near one of the classrooms between 12:00 and 12:30 Monday through Friday.  Since we didn't know how many would come on a given day, it was first come first serve.  We also had bags of cold water along.

It was such a fun time to visit with the students each day.  Some came almost every day, others came from time to time.  We often ran out of sandwiches, which always made me feel terrible.  

On Wednesdays, I packed up 4 sandwiches and took them to the group of girls I meet with weekly. After our Bible study it was time to eat! 

 One day, we arrived at 12:02 and one of the students  already had his phone out to call us to make sure we hadn't had a break-down.  Oh, that they would be as much on time to all the other meetings!

The final day 40 sandwiches were gone in 11 minutes!  And we needed at least seven more.  It was a lot of work but so worth it.  I don't think I will eat omelettes for a while!