Special dishes, Ghanaian style

Adut managed a fashion boutique in Juba and was famous among her friends for her low tolerance for games. When Kwame, a Ghanaian entrepreneur based in Accra, asked what kind of food she loved, she answered honestly: "Anything that respects the spice." He said it was the best answer he had ever received.

Their first date was not at a restaurant. Kwame had rented a private cook at a quiet spot near the river and prepared jollof the way his grandmother taught him, insisting Adut sit down and do nothing. She ate three plates and told him he had set an unreachable standard.

He visited Juba often after that, and every trip came with a meal — Pyramid fine dining, the new seafood spot by the bank, garden restaurants she had never been to. He took her to a chef's tasting table once and watched her face the whole night.

He proposed with a ring hidden inside a folded recipe book he had written for her: all the dishes he had ever made for her, plus space for the ones they would make together. The wedding mixed Ghanaian and South Sudanese food so completely that no one could tell where one tradition ended and the other began.

"Everyone asks me how I knew," Adut says. "I knew when a man from another country learned my city's best food spots just to see me smile. That is not money. That is attention, and attention is the richest thing a man can give."