So Friday, we had a set of volunteers come to talk to us about educating families on nutrition in our sites, we were taught ways to rehydrate babies and techniques of preparing food for babies. Well, we were also taught about how to prevent or help anemia. This including a lesson on cooking liver and BLOOD. Yeah...I didn't know you could cook blood, but apparently if you put a little in a frying pan with some onions and other veggies, you are able to cook blood, and it looks like little pieces of meat. After the lesson, we were encouraged to try some of the blood! I decided to stay close to one of the vegetarians and when they came around offering, I declined. I give myself a lot of credit, I'm trying tons of new foods here, but as for blood....it's NOT happening.
That wasn't the best part....the volunteer said that she decided to experiment one day and kept the blood in liquid form and mixed it in pancake batter and added a little chocolate. Which pretty much turned out to be chocolate blood brownies!!! I passed on these as well! I get that this may be things I will have to deal with at my site, but for now, I am just going to wait and deal with it at my site!
Saturday, we went to a University in Lima to study organic farming, I thought we'd be more in a classroom, but I guess if that is one thing I'm learning about the Peace Corp...everything is hands on. We rotated through 7 stations of learning to transplate, grow, make mulch, try fruits and veggies, mix up the dirt, and all kinds of stuff. We got dirty! It was interesting, well as much as I could understand, the students that were teaching us spoke very fast so it was difficult for me to pick up on everything. At our sites we will be expected to start gardens so this is all training for that, we are going back 4 more times to watch the progess of our gardens at the university and to study other topics.
After the lesson at the University, we went to the mall! The mall was identical to a U.S. mall (except the Salisbury Mall...sorry guys that mall SUCKS!)...I felt like I was in mini America, it had the north face, calvin klein, united colors of benetton, kennith cole, lots of good stuff. However, I'm realizing that now that I'm living off of a peace corp budget, much of what is sold there is out of my price range!!! The main reason we went though, was for the food court!!! I never wanted to be one of those Americans who only ate american when I traveled out of the country, but the truth is...when your here and your eating rice and potatoes and chicken most days...a pizza hut or burger king looks like heaven. So that is exactly what I did, I went and got a tiny little pizza from pizza hut and it was wonderful. There were 14 of us who ate lunch together and the table was covered in pizza hut, kfc, and burger king. We also discovered a few restaurants at the mall, they had TGI Fridays, Tony Romas, Benihana, and chilis!
This is a big week, today I am going to the Peace Corp headquartes in Lima for a few interviews regarding my site and my progress here so far. Then Friday I have another interview for my spanish, and to see if I am progressing and able to move up a level. So in preparation, my Spanish teacher decided that we are going to have 4 hours of strictly conversation in class this morning. This is going to be exhausting! But I'm sure it will prepare me well for Friday. Wish me luck!!
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