Cakes, Chapatti, and Mandazi

 By Sara:

One of our friends, Rose, the women's leader in North Teso, told me years ago that she had a dream about me doing ministry together with her.  To some extent, her dream came true when Betty and I went to Katakwi to teach some of the women in her area how to make cakes, chapatti, and mandazi.  Betty is an excellent translator and home baker, so she helped me with translation and taught the sessions on chapatti and mandazi.

Only one of the women had ever made chapatti before, so there was a lot of laughter as everyone struggled to roll out a perfect circle of dough.

A few young men also showed up to learn and got a chance to try cooking the chapatti too.

After mixing together the ingredients for one cake, under Betty and my supervision, the group felt confident enough to make the second one alone.  There's no social distancing in the village...

Mandazi are like small, simple doughnuts.  Basically just balls of fried dough.  You can buy mandazi and chapatti pretty much everywhere as street food, so some of these ladies were hoping to make a business of selling one or the other.  The challenge, though, is that the price of ingredients, like flour and oil, has been steadily increasing, but people refuse to buy the final product for less than the price they've been used to over the past years.  We calculated that they would make hardly any profit (like 30 cents) from what they made if they sold all of it at the accepted price.  Betty had to give them ideas of ingredients to leave out and fillers to add in (like maize flour or cassava flour) so they would be less expensive to make for future business ventures.