Thursday, February 21

While we were fresh off a shorter day on Wednesday, we were all moving a bit more slowly as the week went on. Still, we kept plugging along, continuing raising the walls and moving from inside the house to finishing some of the outside the house yard work. It's filthy work, but those ditches needed to be dug!

And as we kept on building, the snack hits kept on coming. Every morning at 10 and every afternoon at 2:30 or 3 we were served snacks--a little something to help us keep going. From the very beginning, the snacks were absolutely incredible.

Part of the reason they were so great is because they were so fresh! I mean, canned pineapple cannot come close to comparing with pineapple freshly cut, and probably picked just a few hours prior. And that was only one of the first snacks we got!

Another afternoon featured fresh coconut milk and meat. We saw the coconuts unloaded from the truck, and then Cesar and Veronica chopped them open with a machete for us to stick a straw into and drink. When we finished the milk in a coconut, they cut open the husk to allow us to scoop out the coconut meat. It was definitely a treat that is just NOT the same in the US. It was, however, a treat that got mixed reviews from the group. While some loved the taste, others could only take a few sips of the very rich, sweet milk.

Wednesday afternoon was my favorite snack story. I was mixing the mortar with Cesar, when he pointed out a mango tree. A mango tree that was being climbed by his wife, who was picking green mangos! For snack that afternoon, we had green mangos (peeled, cut with a knife, then spread with salt and sometimes with tobasco sauce), almost directly from the tree! Veronica was wicked with the knife. She made cuts in the mango so quickly while holding the fruit that we were a bit afraid; so to show off, she closed her eyes! That's what I call skill.

There were all sorts of other fresh fruits--watermelon, bananas (while they weren't ripe yet, we did see bananas growing on the tree that we eventually cut down in the family's backyard) , and cantaloupe. We also had freshly squeezed juice from various other fruits for lunch. They came in these plastic baggies, tied up tight. To drink, you either had to bite off a small corner of the bag and drink it straight from the bag, or you had to carefully try to pour it into your glass (some did this with more success than others. But with everything so fresh and so delicious, it'll be hard getting used to what we get in the grocery store again!