I want to focus this week on strange encounters with food while traveling. Sometimes this will be encountering strange food but in today’s photo the food was normal but the encounter was not what I expected.

I went to Tanzania with a group of 10 people from my church and the main reason we went was to form closer ties to a sister church on the slopes of Kilimanjaro which was caring for orphans, most of whom were orphaned by AIDS. We attended the local church service and when we walked out we walked right into the middle of this scene with one of the elders of the church auctioning off good, mostly locally produced food, including this rooster. It turns out that in a country where a school teacher makes $3 a day there is also a barter economy so people who don’t have cash to support the church will bring eggs, ground nuts (peanuts) and an occasional rooster. They auction these off after the service and the proceeds go toward the parishioner’s contribution. On this particular date many of the goods bought were given to us as gifts since we were visiting, or were given to a young man about to be married with a fair amount of good-natured teasing.