Pastel de Nico

¡Feliz martes! Another week has flown by, and I’m sitting in my brightly colored bedroom (everything, including the bedspread and my t-shirt, is yellow right now) before lunch working on the weekly blog post. It smells like my host mom is cooking something really good today, so if this post ends up a little short, that’s why!

Look - I wasn't kidding about all the yellow! 

I reached a great milestone in my Spanish-speaking today during class:

I felt like me.

To elaborate, when I was talking with my maestra during class this morning I felt like I was being myself when I talked in Spanish for one of the first times. I wasn’t constantly struggling to find the right words and conjugate them correctly. I wasn’t thinking every word in English first and then translating to Spanish. I was listening, joking around, and sharing my opinions about politics and religion in Spanish. My conversation skills are still far from perfect, but it was a huge encouragement to experience that sense of ‘self’ today.

I usually scan through my photos from the week to help me think of what I should write about in these posts, and this week, I decided to look through all of my photos from Guatemala so far. All 324 of them. Set up with some music slideshow-style as only iPhoto can do, I was grateful to realize the shear quantity and quality of experiences I have had in less than six weeks. I think that if I were to return home now, I could still look back on this experience as a life-changer. I can only imagine the effect that nearly five more months will have…

Last week, we got a visit from a comadrona (rural midwife). She showed us a lot of medicinal plants and was great at explaining life in the rural communities. Fascinating! 

Now getting to my post title: Pastel de Nico. If the first two words in Spanish didn’t throw you off, you’ll realize that the last word is my name (my Spanish name, anyway). The first word, ‘pastel,’ translates to ‘cake'. The interesting part is I don’t think I those two words have been in the same sentence before…at least not in this context...until this week.

On Friday the other student – Hannah – who had been living with me and my host family left to return to the U.S., and we had a despedida (going-away party) for her on Thursday night. One of my biggest problems is trying to please everyone, and sometimes this gets me into a bind --- which has never been as prevalent as it was last Thursday. We ended up talking about cheesecake at breakfast, and I offered to make some for the despedida. That gave me just a morning to find a recipe, go across town to the store that would have everything I needed, and actually make the cheesecake for the party. I ended up finding a recipe that only required a refrigerator, which boosted my confidence. After I bought the ingredients, everyone pitched in to help make the cheesecake. Three hours of refrigeration and a pound of strawberries later, they were done! And soooo delicious. My first cheesecake in Guatemala, and many of my family members’ first experience with the dessert.

One of the finished cheesecakes, with my host-sister Gabi.

This ‘cooking’ experience (if you can call it that, since I didn’t use an oven) ended up going a lot deeper than I was expecting. Spending time combining the ingredients into something delicious – and taste-testing along every step of the way – with my family led to some amazing conversation, joking around, and dissolution of barriers. It made us closer and brightened our dynamic.

Food is a powerful thing. It ties people together. This is one important lesson I learned this week, and I think it is going to influence the rest of my time here. Even with the cultural differences, food can break down walls. I have heard before that if you need to have a difficult conversation with someone, have it over a meal to ease the pressure. I think that idea should be amended to include actually cooking the meal together. Maybe solutions to many of our inter-personal problems and issues in our societies are just waiting to be found in the kitchen….

All of the talk of food is making me hungry, and I think lunch is ready. Hasta próxima vez, tienes una buena semana!

Paz,

Nico

P.S. Post-lunch update: we had chile rellenos for the first time, my host-mom’s favorite. Yummmm!