Sunshine

Okay, so you may have noticed that we eat at the same place every day.
Or you may be curious how one of the most successful businesses in
Koidu Town works. Or you might just be wondering what people in Kono
District eat. Well, here's all that and more. We're going to Sunshine.
We went there on the first day I arrived in Kono, and I've gone back
almost every day since. I have yet to spend enough money to buy me a
plate of rice and sauce at Masala Grill, the most legitimate Indian
restaurant in Princeton.
The entrance to Sunshine is not obvious to the uninitiated. From the
street, there is a nice-looking sign. By nice-looking, I mean that it
is rectangular, white, and the letters are large and black: Sunshine.
It's oriented perpendicular to the road, so you can see it as you walk
towards it from either side. As a side note, throughout Sierra Leone,
advertisements aren't on billboards. They get painted on to houses,
roofs, doors, gates, and any other static surface. The owners of the
house or whatever sell the space to a company, usually a cell phone
company, and then someone comes and paints it. Apparently the cell
companies come around to make sure you haven't cheated them by
painting over their ad. The two most common are Zain, which paints
buildings neon green, and Africell, which paints buildings orange. It
makes for colorful streets.
The road is red, dusty, and lined with market stalls and houses. Both
the market stalls and houses are based off of a row of broken down
single storey cinder block rooms, each about 150 sq ft. They all have
some combination of corrugated tin roofing, wooden sticks for support,
and planks to provide shelves, surfaces and counters. In general it's
pretty obvious that nobody every needs to seal up for winter.
The sign doesn't actually sit in front of Sunshine. It's about fifteen
feet short of the alleyway between broken down cinder block walls that
leads there. So you have to step across the gutter (jump if you're
Katie and 5 foot few) and then duck into the alley. Sometimes when
someone describes something as an "alley" I think of tall, Gotham City
style alleys, dark and full of criminals. This alley is different.
None of the buildings in Koidu Town are tall, and few of them provide
any shade beyond their immediate footprint, so it's very bright. The
ground is still light brownish red dirt, like the road. On the left
there is a collection of young men selling sunglasses, and two steps
further back is a lady who lays out forty odd small mangoes on a
blanket. They're 100Le each (3 cents). You have to make a zigzag
pattern around the right hand side of the sunglasses and the lefthand
side of the mango lady, because the alley isn't wide. Nonetheless,
motorbikes go through there all the time. Today there was also a baby
goat lying under a small, dead-looking tree just beyond the woman
selling mangoes.
There's also usually a small crowd of children milling around behind
the mango lady. Once, when Katie and I came to Sunshine, we passed the
mango lady and a small boy stepped out in front of us. He stopped,
looked up at us with a thoughtful expression, and said to himself in a
matter of fact tone, "Chinese man." So as you pass the children, you
may be assigned multiple ethnicities or genders, and you'll probably
create a stir. My favourite part is when there is a teenager nearby
who sneers at the excitable children. It's nice to have some cultural
constants.
After the mango lady you pass two more of those square cinder block
enclosures on the left, both growing some kind of grass and much more
broken down then the others. There's an open space ahead that's full
of market stalls and people, but to get to Sunshine you have to turn
left. Between Sunshine and the market stalls there are probably a few
motorbikes as well, waiting with their handlebars locked to one side.
The first time I went to Sunshine, after we made this lefthand turn I
seriously thought we were going somewhere else instead of a
restaurant. It looks like it dead ends twenty feet in, with a one
storey building under construction on the right, a couple of unused
ovens or kilns straight ahead, and rusty corrugated tin on the left.
But no, there's a door-shaped hole in the corrugated tin, and when you
duck through it, you're there. You have to duck – I'm 5'10, or 5'11 if
someone near me is shorter than me and claiming 5'11, and most people
I've met in Kono are shorter than me. So sometimes I hit my head on
stuff. It's a new experience.
On my first visit, I was skeptical, and I would be worried if you
weren't as well. It's dark, the floor is dirt, and the air is heavy
with water and food smell and person smell. There's a table on the
left with two benches, and a table on the right with two benches.
There are peeling plastic tablecloths on both tables, but only the
lefthand one has napkins. Well, it has a plastic bag tissue box. Most
times there is a crowd, but we can find a place to squeeze in on the
bench. The tables aren't really higher than the bench, so you have to
awkwardly figure out where to put your knees.
At the opposite end from the entrance sits a woman, with three
gigantic pots in front of her. One holds rice, one holds "soup", and
one holds "sauce." It turns out that Sunshine is also the name of the
woman who runs the place, so it's often her holding court above the
three vats of food. Other than that, one of her daughters is usually
buzzing around, getting water from a cooler sitting off to the side
for customers that request it. Around the corner about ten feet away
is where they prepare the meat. The restaurant is more open to the air
on that side, and that opening leads to the cooking area. My first
time there I saw a preteen boy chopping up a side of beef into a
bucket, and I think the side of beef probably outweighed him. The NOW
staff assured me it was clean, and I tried not to think about it.
"Soup" is groundnut soup. It's brown, slightly spicy, and vaguely
nutty. There's both stewing beef and fish in the big vats of sauce and
soup, but if you don't specify Sunshine will just spoon you beef. I
prefer the beef because I'm a wimp when it comes to fishbones. If you
ask for fish, you're liable to get a pile of rice, a dollop of sauce,
and a fish, cooked but intact.
"Sauce" is either based in potato leaves, cassava leaves, or "green"
leaves. I have no idea what green leaves are. The liquid in the soup
and sauce is mostly palm oil. The sauce tends to be spicier. It's
spicy in a sneaky way, too – if you swallow it right, it just has a
very strong taste. But if it somehow stays on your throat, then it
burns. I once had an embarrassing spate of sneezing and coughing
brought on by exactly that. The sauce is my favorite, because it has
so much taste. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.
It's worth mentioning the rice, too. Sierra Leoneans call it "rais."
The Sunshine rice is imported, Jalloh tells me. It's rounder,
fluffier, and more satisfying than normal rice. It has enough flavor
of its own that it doesn't taste watery, and it soaks up the soup and
sauce very well. Most important, there's always mounds of it.
You can order three sizes: 3000Le, 4000Le, or 5000Le. You get the same
amount of rice with each, but they give you more meat with the more
expensive dishes. It's a bit unclear, but there's some kind of
equalization that goes on. I've only ever ordered 3000 plates, and I
have never left Sunshine feeling hungry.
If you want water, you catch the attention of the extra woman just
hanging around and just call out "water!" I've tried please and
thankyou, but that just adds confusion. Then she dips into the cooler
and fishes you out a bag of water. That's right, a bag of water.
They're called "water sachets." Each one has between 450 and 500 mL of
water (a pint, for the Americans) and is square. They look a bit like
mini couch cushions. You have to bite off the corner and then squeeze
it into your mouth. I still embarrass myself with regularity while
trying to do this. Once, at the clinic, I sprayed Katie's keyboard
with water. No worries, it was fine...
After Sunshine scoops you your food, it gets passed to you via the
seated clientele. Nobody waits for everyone to get their food before
they start, and I've already switched over. Not only do people not
wait, but they eat very fast, even faster than me. It's a small
reminder that most Sierra Leoneans have a very different relationship
with food than myself and most North Americans. I don't pretend to be
super skinny, but it's worth mentioning that probably 80% of the
people here are noticeably skinnier than me. Allan tells me that every
one of the NOW staff has been hungry, truly hungry, at some point in
their lives.
Wolfing down the food doesn't take that long, unless the spice causes
you to spray it all over the place and embarrass yourself. When you're
done eating, it's my second favourite part. The meal's 3000Le, and the
water is 500Le. So, altogether, that's 1.10 USD. What a bargain.