Food for Egyptian Children

We enjoyed giving them little things. Like, we had little cans over there, again about four inch round, about two inch high. Disc chocolate, there’d be five or six disc chocolate, like a molasses cookie say, the size, chocolate and packed in 1942. You would open it up and it was as white as your sheet of paper there, chocolate. It was chocolate as it is chocolate brown, and they were harder than heck but still chocolate. We’d give it to the kids, we’d open them up, we had these little tiny can openers. We always carried one on our dog tag, chain, so we’d give them a can and we’d show them how to operate it and let them go home with it, the kids. When we moved in Rafah, in April mid April of ‘57, we were in this camp of Raffa and kids would come near the fence bumming food, and they wanted, “Mungoria, Mungoria!!”, they’d say, “I’m hungry!” Their word was Mungoria. So we’d give them things. Rations that we had, when we went on trips they’d give us a ration pack, you had like five packs, little packs about, a little bit smaller than a car battery say. And five of them would be in one big box so we’d call them five in ones and each pack was a one man ration pack for 24 hours. You’d have like a book of matches to light your little stove and you had a little fuel thing that you could light, ignite to get a little fire going to heat up your water for tea or you got a little envelope of coffee and a tea bag and an envelope of sugar in it. Then you had a little tin of apricots or something, maybe a little tin of beans, another little tin could be two wieners cut up or something, you know.