Wow, it's hard to believe that we're almost finished with January, I feel as if this month has just flown by! What have I been doing? Well, that's a good question, because thinking back, I can’t think of what, but I have been busy! A lot of my time recently has been taken up with meetings--meetings with the “Junta de Vecinos” (Literally translated—Neighborhood Group, but basically the group that takes care of community infrastructure, sanitation, etc); meetings with my youth group, and then the small group of leaders within that group; organizing discussions for teenagers with our local doctor; meeting with our “health promoters” and an outside NGO that wants to do a nutrition program for children, etc.. etc.. etc...
But with all these meetings, I still don't have much to report, many things, such as my youth group, are just beginning, so things are going slowly—I'm just excited that we have elected a president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer!
Since there is so much, yet so little, to report right now, I'm going to instead focus on something that I haven’t talked about much: day-to-day life here. First off, electicity: I had mentioned a while ago that our electricity is not always reliable, but it is supposed to have a schedule—it's usually on from 10am to 2 pm, and then returns around 7 pm and goes out sometime in the early morning. Every night when the electricity comes on everyone in the community cheers, and every day at 10 when the electricity comes on about half of the community turns on their music full blast while other half turns on their TVs to start watching the telenovelas.
The water here is also come and go—my host family has a spout in the back of their house and when there is water we fill up lots of large buckets and during the day we use the water in those buckets to bathe, wash the dishes, wash clothes, etc... My host family has a latrine out in the back of their house as well as a private area made out of tin and wood where we bathe. The house itself is considered a normal house around here—it has a cement floor and is made of tin and wood. It is obviously not impermeable to mice, rats or big bugs, but it's comfortable enough. My host mother and I have our own rooms, while the brother and two youngest sisters share a room. The oldest sleeps in the barracks next to our house.
And now, the other part of daily living: food. We eat similar foods just about every day, so here, for example is what I ate today and yesterday:
Breakfast: Fried green plaintains (green on the outside, meaning they are not sweet) with fried salami,
Yesterday: a soup of noodles with garlic
Lunch: Chicken fried in seasoning with onions and garlic, rice with peas cooked with onions, garlic, salt, bullion and oil,
Yesterday: rice cooked with beans and onion, garlic, salt, etc, and boiled eggplant cooked with plenty of seasonings.
Dinner: Boiled yucca and fried egg,
Yesterday: a bowl of cream of corn flour (pretty similar to cream of wheat).
During the day when we're lucky we also have plenty of fruit: bananas, oranges, sometimes papaya, etc.
As you'll notice, vegetables are a bit lacking in my diet, mainly because here in the community noone sells or grows things like carrots, tomatoes or lettuce (the two vegetables that you do see here are squash and eggplant) but when I go into the bigger town nearby I usually try to buy some kind of vegetable.
Soon I will be moving out of my host family's house and will be living basically on my own, but I am going to continue eating lunch frequently with my host family because, even though I would have never believed this four months ago, I have come to like eating rice every single day and I know I cannot prepare the rice like my host family can!
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