Who Says the Gringa Can’t Cook?! Parte Dos

2-16-11

This weekend, having finally come into my own as a seasoned, hardened, tried-and-true veteran (snort, snort, giggle) with one year of experience under my belt, Peace Corps sent a trainee to stay with me in my site.

See, the way it works is that after about three weeks of training, Peace Corps decides that a new volunteer has had appropriate time to adjust to the mental, physical, and emotional shock that’s politely termed “transition to life as a PCV”.  After this ever-so-gentle cushion period, the trainees are then packed off willy-nilly to visit a current volunteer in their site for what’s known as an immersion weekend.  Sent off with a volunteer name, phone number, bus route, and toilet paper (it’s best not to go anywhere in this country without toilet paper), the trainee has to make their way they best they can, using whatever Spanish skills they’ve acquired in three weeks, to their assigned volunteer’s site.  It’s like Survivor: Peace Corps edition.  If you find yourself in Honduras, Guatemala, or the ocean, you’ve gone too far.  If you find yourself somewhere where they speak English, you’ve gone way too far, and may continue to make your way northward until your reach your state of residence.  And if you get robbed on the bus, you’re voted off the island in a dramatic and unnecessarily prolonged ceremony involving tiki torches and a film crew.

Some of you may remember my own Immersion Weekend experience from a fun little blog post I entitled “The One Where Emilie Meets a Rat” (February 2010).

I was fairly determined to give my trainee a good weekend though, and gave her the most explicit instructions I could – I even met her in Chalate, so she didn’t have to worry about finding her way all the way to my actual site.  We met around noon, grabbed lunch at my favorite restaurant, did a bit of shopping, and hopped the three o’clock bus.  As always, it was ridiculously crowded, even though we got there an hour ahead of time, but we managed to squeeze into a couple seats towards the very back.  We were pressed in on every side by inquisitive Salvadorans, their curiosity incited by the phenomena of seeing not one but two gringas (they’re multiplying!), but it was overall not the worst bus ride I’ve ever head.  (No, that ride involved two hours of me perched on the engine hatch, staring down a pair of malcontent chickens while being ogled on the other side by a prurient and poor-smelling bolo.)  This ride was really not so bad, all things considered, which is why I was surprised when the first thing my trainee said when we got off the bus was,

“I don’t think I can do this.”

Great. In thirty minutes, I had single handedly managed to force into a complete 180 a person who, presumably, has been working their way to Peace Corps posting for at least a year.  And she hadn’t even seen my latrine yet.

She went on to exclaim to me, “It’s SO far out…it’s just SO rural!  Don’t you get bored here?  Don’t you get lonely?”  Huh.  Well, I hated to burst her bubble, but I had to be honest: my site is one of the least rural of all the sites in our program – which after all is specifically titled, “RURAL Health”.  Perhaps she missed the pamphlet.  As for boredom – well, let’s just say that I bless my grandmother daily for sending me several packs of playing cards.  And it’s hard to get lonely in a town where you can’t get people off your front porch.

But I guess I really have gotten so used to my life here that I forgot what it might look like to someone unaccustomed to the campo.  I mean, the bumpy, dusty road that constitutes my commute to Chalate is just another part of my day now.  And provided I can find a seat that’s not next to a goat, chicken, or bolo, I’m pretty much happy as a clam.

It was alright, though.  After spending a few minutes relaxing in my hammock (a cure all for whatever ails the average PCV), she admitted that she may have been a bit hasty in her assessment of my home, and magnanimously declared that it might not be so bad after all, and perhaps she could, in fact, do it.  Which is good, considering that she’s staring two years of dusty bus rides, pit toilets, and bucket baths in the face.  After the initial shock, the weekend went fairly smoothly.  We spent most of Friday going door to door, introducing my trainee to the community (she has excellent Spanish too, gosh darn her! – made me look bad) and inviting women to the healthy cooking class I was holding Sunday morning at my house.  After exhausting her completely with walking, I confessed that, thanks to an insufficient water supply and months of dry weather, I didn’t actually have any water to bathe with, and we’d have to go down to the river.  She took this quite well and was actually very enthusiastic.  Truthfully, she reminded me of the first time I had to go to the river to bathe/wash clothes:  This is so cool!  The water’s so refreshing!  I’m so Peace Corps right now!  Of course, that sense of novel discovery and enthusiasm wears off pretty rapidly after the second time you have to balance a bucket of wet, heavy laundry on your hip to make the backbreaking climb back up from the river.  And then still have three more loads to go.  I decided not to tell her that.

Saturday afternoon we had a meeting with the water committee.  Since the engineers from Engineers Without Borders haven’t contacted me in a couple weeks, I took very little part in the meeting beyond attempting to smile as my counterpart referred to me condescendingly as la muchacha for the hundredth time.  (I know you know my name you sexist bastard.  Don’t try to tell me you can remember the first, middle, and two last names of every single flipping man on the directiva to introduce them formally, but your memory unfortunately fails you when you look at me.  I’m a frickin’ licenciada!  Any of you guys got a college degree??  Didn’t think so.)

Sorry, that was a slightly bitter deviation from the story.  Back on track, then.

Truthfully, the most diverting part of this punishing, three-and-a-half hour meeting, was when a chicken flapped into the middle of the room.  Everybody stared at it, while the guy talking continued on, unperturbed and uninterrupted, as he had been for the last forty-five minutes.  (He was talking about the “legal matters” concerning the water system.  I don’t think he was actually a lawyer, but he certainly could have had a good go at the profession…)  Finally, Don Rojilio got up and started waving his arms slowly at the chicken, as though summoning the power of the Jedi to force it to leave the room.  I had a sudden vision of an American boardroom, forty stories in the air, with a long, cherry wood table surrounded by serious businessmen, wearing serious business suits, with serious expressions on their faces.  Suddenly, a scrawny chicken flaps onto the polished table, leaving feathers and shit in its wake…

So at least I got a bit of a private laugh from that.

Thank God, even the worst, longest, most boring meetings come to an end, and I managed to ease myself off the stack of bamboo poles I had just spend the last three-and-a-half hours sitting on with only a small groan.  (Did I mention that we don’t have any particularly good places to hold meetings in our town?  If anybody knows any rich contractors looking to do a bit of good in the developing world, we could certainly use a casa comunal…)  By some miracle, despite the horrible bus ride, dusty roads, unpleasantly steep hills, and outrageously long meeting I had put my trainee through, she wasn’t ready to ET (early terminate) her service quite yet. 

She spent Saturday night with my former host family, according to the Peace Corps’ request that the trainee spend a night with a Salvadoran family in my site.  My host family’s house, I’m pleased to say, is rat-free, so my trainee’s night was much less eventful than my own was, a year ago.  Sunday morning, I got up bright and early to prepare for a 9 am healthy cooking class I was giving to the women in my town.  I was holding it on my front porch, and I was able to prepare a very nice little charla on nutrition before the cooking portion of the class, thanks to my Mom.  Mom sent me a bunch of materials on nutrition (in Spanish) that are put out by the US government for teachers, including a wonderful, compact little handout that has a picture of the new food pyramid, along with pictures of the foods in each group.  (Which is good, considering that a number of the women in my town are illiterate.)  I made a large copy of Mi Pyrámide Saludable (my healthy pyramid) which I posted on the front of my house and explained to the women of my town.  We talked about the importance of eating foods from every group, but most especially vegetables, as that’s something that’s lacking in the average Salvadoran diet.  Then we got down to the nitty-gritty. 

The keys to healthy cooking.  They’re basic, really.  I kept it simple, so as not to overwhelm them with too much information at once:

LESS oil.  LESS salt.  MORE vegetables.  MORE water.

That was it.  If I could get women to follow these for themselves and their families, the health of my community would probably improve dramatically.  As proof that it is in fact possible to cook (hopefully) tasty meals without huge quantities of salt and oil, I dragged my gas stove outside, and let them watch me while I cooked for them.

I’ll admit that, when it comes to cooking, I’m in nowhere NEAR the same weight class as my mother.  But I have to say, if you’ve never spent half an hour cooking with twenty skeptical Salvadoran women staring at your backside, you’ve never really cooked at all.  Hell’s Kitchen, Iron Chef – child’s play.  Try convincing women who have spent the last forty years cooking beans and rice in a pot of oil that – no, really – soy protein and vegetables cooked in water, and flavored with curry, black pepper, and a single bouillon cube is really quite tasty.

And heaven help me, I may have actually succeeded.

I had at least half the women ask for second helpings, and they were incredibly engaged in the cooking process, asking me questions the whole time.  They wanted to know what ingredients I was using (tomatoes, onion, and green pepper), if they could substitute other vegetables (of course), and if I really was only going to use that teeny, tiny teaspoon of oil (yes).  At the end, a number of them asked me where they could find the soy protein and how much it cost.  (Only 42 cents a bag!)  In fact, my class was so successful, that I had women who couldn’t make it stopping me later and asking me if I was going to do more of them, and when they were so they could be there.

So, now I’m a cooking instructor.  (How did this happen, again?)  However, living twenty-six years under the influence of my mother (as little time as I actually spent in the kitchen with her, to my eternal shame) has to tell.  Turns out I may have absorbed more of the cooking ideas she tried to knock into my head than I thought.  I’m applying for a grant, so I can do the classes twice a month and not have to worry about paying for all the food out of pocket.

I left my trainee at the bus stop a couple hours later, with perhaps a slightly revised version of volunteer life, but not really any worse for the wear.  Hallelujah.