Ok - don't judge! :-P Yesterday night I walked along the buffet counter in the hotel and all the signs suggested some fairly strange food, so I headed over to the pasta counter, thinking that would be a safe option! Hahaha...! So I really felt like pesto, not sure why but I just REALLY love the stuff and have done all year; but the lady doing the pasta only had a little bowl of it which she was using to flavour other sauces, like tomato and stuff! So I asked her, in Spanish, if they had pesto, and she said yes, so I asked for that and she was like, "Just pesto?" And I said, "Yes." So a man went off to find a big tray of pesto and while we were waiting we were chatting, and I was enjoying being able to converse in Spanish! But I got a bit excited - about talking in Spanish - so when she said, "You must like pesto!", I answered, "¡Sí, MUCHO pesto!" (= "Yes, A LOT OF pesto!", rather than "I like pesto A LOT!"). And so she PILED it on! And as I walked back to my seat with my luminous green pasta, I thought to myself, "Why did you have to go and get so excited?" The lesson I take away from that; not that I shouldn't get so excited, but that I shouldn't get so excited WHILST ordering food!!! ;-D
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It just tastes of real bananas!!! Think of a banana in it's prime - when it's flavour is the most like "banana" as it will ever be, and then add a dose more of "pure banana"!!! It was like a creamy, dreamy drink-form of a REAL banana! But unlike the banana smoothies I've ever made at home, the bananas here never seem to taste as if they're going brown!!! WHAT?!
So in the immensely long time it took me to drink my MASSIVE shake, not once did it ever taste of anything but a fresh, ripe banana! This country never ceases to amaze me! So we picked up the first team from the airport on Sunday afternoon - a relatively small team of only 6 - and they’re all great! :-D Watching them exceed their comfort zones and get stuck into everything is just wonderful, and the stuff they are doing is making a real difference to real people, which again is great! There’s so much I could write here (and so much I want to!), but I’ll have to limit it somehow, so I’ll try to keep my points brief! On Monday we gave the team an in-country orientation and took them on a tour of some of the villages and talked to them about how things work here in the DR; as part of which we visited the village I built a house in last year when I came over the first time last September! There were still a couple of houses down the bottom with no rooves on, but other than that it’s a lovely, lively community! It was great to see what all my digging, digging, digging has now become; a beautiful home, a lot of them painted on the outside and with decoration - people really making them their own. It showed perfectly what the Samaritan Foundation (the charity we partner with to build the houses) does; it creates village communities, not just houses! On Tuesday we actually started working on the house this team have sponsored! A house which was a shell of just the walls and roof when we arrived and now has a level, concreted floor and windows! Which is exciting!!! We’ve also been levelling out other floors and painting more windows too - so construction is underway and coming on! In the afternoon we went to a community called Chichigua. It’s a village of about 60-65 families living in shacks made out of whatever they could find and with very little by way of material possessions. But what everybody on our team commented on was how they had so much more; so much community, so much love! We went to do some activities with the kids and give them all some biscuits and vitamin drink and stuff, and my highlight has to be when we went around the village collecting the children first (less child-catcher-esque than it sounds!) - as a group of white people, you tend to just attract children everywhere in the villages we work in!!! But our translator was shouting in Spanish about what we were going to be doing and 3 little boys came running over and clambered up into the arms of some of the waiting team members, and everywhere else we went they had their HUGE smiles on and were shouting as loud as they could, “¡¡¡JUEGOS!!! ¡Juegos en la Iglesia!”, which means, “GAMES!!! Games in the church!” They were SO excited!!! :-D The latter half of the week was characterised by A LOT of time playing with kids! GREAT FUN!!! Making castles out of bottle tops; pretending I could catch a cow (one of the little boys!) by throwing it over my shoulder; and getting my hair “curled” and done up like a princess! One of the girls on the team and I also managed to teach them a new game; ‘Duck, duck… goose!’ Except we didn’t know the words for ‘duck’ or ‘goose’, so we taught them ‘Vaca, vaca… pollo!’; ‘Cow, cow… chicken!’ ;-D |
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AuthorI'm a recent Cambridge Theology graduate now studying for a Masters in Biblical Studies and blogging about all sorts of things! I'm interested in faith, Church, theology, social action, the great outdoors and being creative, and all of those things - along with many more - come through in my posts!
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