A little bit of fire and a whole lot o baking

It has been a whirlwind of a week…

Last Sunday we had a brush fire…there is a fire pit about 200 feet from our house and the wind was really strong that day and someone had lit a fire. The wind picked up a piece of trash and carried it about 50 feet from our house. I have never seen anything like it. I was up at the Mom’s project at the time which is another 200 feet past the burn pile. At that time we had a men’s group visiting the Mission and we were all up at the Mom’s project when one of them noticed all of the smoke that was billowing toward our house. All of a sudden they all took off and they grabbed shovels and rakes and ran to the burn pile to put the fire out. The rest of us went to the pila where we wash our clothes and started filling up buckets of water. There was this tree not too far from the house and the base of it was consumed in flames. The grass was all black and the smoke was unbearable. It was hard to breath. The guys were yelling into the house…”Fire, fire…this is for real…it is not a joke” So they all came running out and in a few short moments they had extinguished the fire!!! Thank goodness they were there…because I don’t know what I would have done.

That was totally amazing…I have never really witnessed a fire being out of control…and it was scary how much power it had. Thankfully we were in the right place at the right time!

On Monday we went up to the Mom’s project and made fried cakes and strawberry syrup as little desserts for the families for Fat Tuesday come a day early! Since I have been here I have had plenty of time hanging out with the kids but I did not know the moms very well so it was nice to spend time with them and get to know them a little better. We brought the ingredients for the cakes and went into their communal kitchen and the mom’s and the volunteers put the dough together and they showed us how to roll the dough out into individual tortillas. It was great watching them work together and having them teach us tricks of the trade.

As we were all in the kitchen rolling out the dough the women were having fun laughing and playing little jokes on each other. It was definitely a room full of joy and happiness. Which I am sure for some of those mothers is a sigh of relief just to enjoy the day without any worries. It was great to see the kids come in and out of the house and you couldn’t tell which child belonged to which mom…they all help each other out and are all friendly with one another. It was great to see the community in which they live and how positive and uplifting it is.

After making the tortillas we melted about 1 ½ lbs of fat and fried the tortillas in the fat…right then and there I swore off all fried foods. Until about 15 minutes later when they insisted that we try one because we had helped cook…and I didn’t want to be rude…and man alive they were delicioso!
Fat Tuesday. So for Fat Tuesday we decided that it would be a great idea for each long term volunteer to make a special dessert. We each took turns baking in the kitchen and after dinner we made a plate for each person in our group along with each person from the Men’s group and we had a chocolate cookie with peanut butter chips, toffee bar, peanut butter chocolate bars, and I make a chocolate cake with butter cream frosting (from scratch…I might add…and it was very tasty!) and we all dove in and enjoyed every last bite. And now I know why it is they have Fat Tuesday right before Lent…get rid of any desire to want to gorge yourself ever again…I felt so ill after my sugar overdose…I don’t know if I have ever has so many choclately, sugary, deliciousness in such a short period of time and about 15 minutes after licking my plate clean I thought I was going to die! Hahaha!

Other than that not too much is going on. We dropped the Men’s group off at the airport on Saturday and then picked up 3 university groups (Catholic University, Villanova, and Vanderbilt). Don’t worry team…I will make sure they all have custom vv apparel.

I will be leading Catholic University and will be in charge of my first work project. So wish me luck…we will be painting the a bunch of houses in the Mom’s project. Next week I will take pics of the different sites so you have an idea of what I am talking about!

I just uploaded my pictures from the past few weeks so they are a bit jumbled. There are pics from my computer class, some from a retreat center we went to…this has all of the pics of the arches, the fire, some churches, waterfall, and the beach pictures are from Tela.

I hope you are all doing well! I miss you!

Joan