More toast

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Our agreement with Grupo Fenix is that we have all our meals catered for. This is the standard setup for volunteers with the programme and makes keeping fed more straightforward than fending for yourself. Breakfast and dinner is always with our host family including lunch on the weekends. Our weekday lunches happen together with the rest of the volunteers (currently three others) and rotate between the women of the community. Through our payments for bed and board as volunteers the families get paid an amount for each meal that they cater. It’s a pretty well thought through arrangement and on the face of it straightforward. We’ve only thrown the system into chaos once. Last week we decide to extend a trip to Managua so we could spend sometime with other cooperative based programmes in search of advice and guidance on how best to spend our time in Sabana Grande. Little did we know that the web of intricate volunteer meal accountancy is agreed upon and carved in stone (metaphorically, they do have paper and computers here) the prior month as money is delivered well ahead of time. The reverberations of our two extra days in Managua have sent shock waves through this accounting bureaucracy. We daren’t ask if the ruptures created by our careless spontaneity have been reconciled and balanced.

Great care has to be applied when voicing approval of any particular food type however minor or through-away the comment. We’ve embarrassingly discovered that our host family will go through hell and high water to make sure it arrives on our table. The key question that needs to be deftly managed is ‘what do you normally eat at home?’ For some unfortunate reason the locals seem to have the impression that food consumed by people in the materially richer parts of our planet must by definition be better. Corn Flakes arrived on our breakfast table one morning and even after detailed dissection of recent comments we could not link it to a loose tongued moment. We’re still living the tostada (toast) legacy based on a brief remark about liking toast for breakfast when we were first asked by our host family. We only said toast as it was what we were given during our first days in Managua little did we know that it’s all about tortillas and not bread in the countryside. However, the important thing is that the food here is excellent. It’s without doubt that the taste and quality of fruit and vegetables, our key measure of a good meal, make much of the unnervingly uniform clone like contents of supermarkets produce departments back home look decidedly average.

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Comments

[Alex]

No bacon and eggs!
Sounds like a great adventure. Hope you are not sleep talking "english breakfast" and giving your hosts heart attacks!! Best wishes, Alex