3/28

My youth group is going well.  I also recently started up my nutrition course.  This has been fun!  It’s a small group of women (because god forbid a man even get near a pot or pan here).  I gave a charla (talk) today about the basic food groups and how to form a balanced meal.  We did a lot of ridiculous interactive activities, which they ate up (no pun intended).  It’s fun to go into this thinking that I’m going to bore them – that this information is far too simple and mundane – to find that they all learn something and actually have questions!  So after I finished explaining the chemical structure of a protein (kidding, but I may have gone a bit overboard using words like organic compound and molecules…what do you expect from someone who majored in bioquemica nutricional y metablismo?), one of my women started to go on a typical Dominican interruptive rant.  She told all of us that she was a vegetarian and that she doesn’t get her protein from meat, but rather from beans or soy.  I go along with this, adding random things, agreeing that beans and soy are good sources of protein…until she goes full force into how God told her she can’t eat any animal meat because it is dirty and is against his will.  Oh Lord (literally).  And guess whose house I was just invited to for a visit?  Aside from the weird things like this that happen in pretty much any meeting I attend or run, all of the kids and women in my groups are great…and I probably will take my new friend up on her invitation sometime soon.

In more serious news, something that I’ve had time to reflect on over the past 2 months while living in my new house is the issue of access to water.  My town has an aqueduct, and there is a tap in my neighbors’ yard from which all of the surrounding houses get their water.  The problem is – water only runs from that tap maybe once or twice a week.  So when the water is running, we all fill up tanks and buckets to store water, as we don’t know when we’ll get it next.  The physical inconvenience of living without running water in your house is easy to get over.  I’ve gotten used to lugging buckets to mop my floor, wash my dishes, take baths, etc.  But it wears on you mentally when you find yourself running low, not knowing when you’ll have access to more.  This is probably one of my biggest stressors.  The fight for access to safe water for everyone is one that’s been going on for years, and I hope that this life I’m living momentarily continues to help me sympathize with and fight for the millions of people around the world (and within my community as well) who have even less access than I do.

And now some pictures…

Someone has out grown her whale pillow (just a little).

 

Out back with my machete.  Plum looks a tad skeptical of my machete-ing abilities.