Dayenu!

Ok, here’s a riddle: What do you get when you put 36 non-Jews, including a priest, 4 Jews, and homemade Matzah in a room together? Answer: a Passover Seder at Kayla’s and Alan’s in Kisumu, Kenya, of course! Man, are we nuts, 40 people for a Seder? We certainly couldn’t have done it without a house staff; made it SO much easier to deal.

Kayla had ordered a bunch of Passover foods online weeks ago but the box is still in transit two days after Passover. Anyway, as the date came closer we realized we were going to have a Seder with no Matzah OR Matzah ball soup! Impossible! Can’t happen, just cancel it! NO we said, and we pushed on to plan B which was to try to get some of the stuff from Nairobi. Believe it or not, there is a Synagogue in Nairobi which, we were told, has a store the sells Jewish foods. Kayla made special arrangements to visit the store on a recent trip to Nairobi. She said it was so heavily fortified you couldn’t see anything but anonymous looking walls and a guard who wouldn’t let her in, just told her the store was not open. So on to plan C; make your own. What the heck, just part of the adventure of living in Africa.

You know these foods have such profound meaning for a Passover that I was a little nervous about attempting to make them. But after looking up how to make them on the internet and finding how easy it eased my mind a bit. I mean, how easy is flour + water and apply a lot of heat!? I even decided to attempt cooking a Matzah ball! Kayla thought we should try Gefilte Fish, since we were on a roll but I thought that might be pushing it a bit, especially since all we have here is tilapia…maybe next year….

Here are photos documenting the cooking. Max “helped” for quite a while, he was really into it. And Esther helped when Max became bored but mostly Kayla helped by taking both kids to the pool for most of the day.

The Matzah turned out to be pretty good; actually, maybe I should try something fancy next time like garlic Matzah or onion Matzah. The Matzah ‘ball’s’, well, they turned out to be more like Matzah ‘geological formations’ instead of balls, I just couldn’t get them to shape into balls. But, believe it or not, people were telling me how good they were; how they compared to some deli they had eaten in back in the states. “Next Year In…..Kisumu????”