How ironic would it be to GAIN weight in Africa?

Preface: I'm not a picky eater. I'm really not. I think picky eating is childish.

I'm not a huge fan of onions (I blame this on my mother, because she ate a case of Vidalia onions--raw--while she was pregnant with me), but I'll eat them, and bananas have to be a very particular shade of yellow, but that's about it.

So my first week in Cameroon, I was eager to try everything. By the end of the second week, I was jonesing for anything American.

From what I can tell, they only eat three dishes in Cameroon:

"Sauce tomate" has a good flavor, but is oily and somehow always contains shards of cow bone, and is served with white rice, which is as boring as, well, white rice

"Ndole" is made of some sort of green, and tastes spinachy at first, but has a nasty bitter after taste, and is served with plaintains, which are fine, except that I am so sick of them after two weeks that I don't understand how people eat so many of them

but the worst of all is...

"Eru." As Cassie said, "It tastes like grass fried in oil." And it is served with "Fufu," with is made from casava flour. It is disgusting. It has the consistency of Play-Doh, and tastes something like papier-maché paste.

My host mother has been very gracious, and has encouraged me to tell her if I don't like something she makes, but I don't have the heart to tell her that I don't like any of it. Also, I made the mistake of telling her that I like African fruit. I do like African fruit, but because I told her so, she won't stop buying it for me. Over the course of a week, she has given me:

3 oranges (which were so hard to peel and so full of seeds that they weren't worth the effort)
2 loaves of white bread (there is no whole grain bread on this continent, as far as I can tell)
12 eggs (how am I supposed to finish a whole dozen eggs by myself?)
5 pineapples (that is so much damn pineapple...)

and 5 papayas. I really wish I could like papaya, because in Cameroon, they're fresh from the trees and delicious, but they have the texture of melon, but less flavor, and for some reason, I always think they'll give me diarrhea. I have no rational reason to think so--they have never given me diarrhea. Someone told me to think of it as "eating a very flagrant flower," which helps, but it still bothers me that the seeds look like fish eggs.

Also, when I scrambled two eggs this morning, they came out light pink instead of yellow...

I bought stuff to make chili, in the hopes that my host mom will realize that I'm capable of feeding myself and stop buying me army loads of food. Chili is cheap in America, and expensive here--the ingredients came out to well over $10. Go figure.

So I have already gone to the bougie ass café that caters to white tourists twice--mmm, pizza and chocolate milkshakes. I think it's going to be a weekly ritual, because the only other things I can find here that I like are sweet yogurts, pastries, and chocolate bars.

Yes, ladies & gentlemen, as people starve all around me, I'm going to get FAT in Africa.