Taste of home: AfriThrive connects immigrants to culturally significant foods

Hellen Bonyi came to Baltimore County from Kenya a decade ago to help care for her grandchildren and struggled to adjust. She most missed food from home.

“Oh, my God, it was terrible,” said Bonyi, 70. “At home [in Kenya], we are used to eating all different kinds of vegetables. Most of the time [here], I was running hungry. I was eating mostly porridge.”

Then came the pandemic. Bonyi’s son, Enock Bonyi, couldn’t work for months in 2020, and what money they had went to rent and utilities. She turned to Truphena and Charles Choti, whom she knew from attending the same church in Rosedale.

Since 2013, the Chotis have distributed food to families in need in Rosedale. They formalized their good deeds in 2019, creating the nonprofit AfriThrive to distribute foods commonly eaten in African, Latin American and Asian households that are hard to find or too expensive for immigrant families. During the height of the pandemic, AfriThrive served around 500 families a week.

Bonyi and her family received money from AfriThrive for rent and utilities for three months. It stabilized their household until her son could return to work.

AfriThrive has since expanded further into Baltimore County and into Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

In July, AfriThrive received $800,000 in federal funding to upgrade its Eastern Boulevard facility in Essex, which will help it serve more people.

In addition to installing a walk-in fridge and freezer, AfriThrive wants to build an industrial kitchen to prepare meals for older adults and people living in shelters.

“The lack of space has really limited us because we serve from outside, and we are limited to serving on the weekend,” Truphena Choti said.

Origin stories

The Chotis came to the United States with their young children for graduate school in 2000. Truphena Choti remembers visiting a Safeway and not finding ingredients from home.

In Kenya, she said, they ate vegetables they picked that day. “The solution came when we started growing food in our backyard and then in a community garden,” she said.

After they began attending church in Rosedale with other immigrants, they heard from others who also missed the food from home.

AfriThrive now serves about 150 families, mostly immigrants from Africa, a week from its Baltimore County distribution center. In Montgomery County, most families are from Latin America and Asia. The organization distributes rice, beans, maize and cassava flour, among other dry goods. It also provides organic vegetables, often cost-prohibitive for families.

AfriThrive grows vegetables on 6 1/2 acres it leases from farms in Montgomery County. It also sources produce from other farms.

Many who live in the community help with planting and harvesting.

“This is a plant our people love,” Elizabeth Kilwake, 64, said recently as she bent to pick leaves from the managu plant, known as African nightshade. “ If you told [Kenyans] managu is here, you’ll see 20 people coming in.”

Kilwake, 64, moved to the United States more than 40 years ago and used to grow Kenyan staples in flowerpots while living in apartments.

She’d wake up at 4 a.m. once a week to drive to New York City to buy finger millet, managu and terere (amaranth leaves).

She met the Chotis when they began distributing food near her home in Wheaton during the pandemic. At the time, she had no income and lived at home with her three children and three grandchildren. She soon started volunteering for AfriThrive.

Walking through rows of vegetables on a Friday afternoon in late August, Kilwake and Charles Choti described the medicinal benefits of the plants and explained how the particular bitterness of the greens reminds them of home.

“When they connect with it here, besides just consuming the food, it has a lot of significance,” Charles Choti said of people they serve.

“Making those resources available [to people] has connected us so deeply and intimately to the members of our communities,” he said. “We have developed a lot of mutual confidence and mutual trust.”

Most of AfriThrive’s volunteers came to the organization in a moment of need and kept volunteering. On food distribution days in Essex, people pick up food, then pull up a chair and spend hours catching up.

“It’s very homey here,” said Nancy Barare, 37, who lives in Owings Mills. She often brings her parents and her two sons — ages 2 and 9 months old — when picking up food.

When Bonyi gets homesick for Kenya, she comes to AfriThrive.

She spends time with other immigrants from Kenya, then returns to her house to cook vegetables. Just like home.