week 23: back to reality (november 17-23)

i ate a fish with an eyeball: well this week it was back to “normal life”. after all the excitement and adventure of haiti, this week was pretty chill and relaxed. i did, however, eat a fish with an eyeball. i took the special needs house to the beach and there were some fishermen that had just come in with their fish. so they were cleaning them and selling them on the beach and one of the tías decided to buy some. now i'm an arizona girl and definitely not a seafood connoisseur… i eat tuna out of the can and sometimes salmon or some whitefish, but it always comes in a nice package at the grocery store and all that’s there is the meat. so, we returned to the house and as i was walking out the door later that afternoon, the tía was like, “wait megan you have to eat fish before you go.” so i stood there and stared at the whole fish she was frying on the stove, with the tails and bones and the eyeballs that seemed to be staring at me, and cheerfully said, “oh sí”. so i ate it… it wasn’t bad, just had to pick around the bones and try not to look at the eyeball. a lot of the volunteers have determined that every day is an adventure cuz you never know what’s going to happen… so this was my adventure for the day.

breakfast of champions: i also had a fun breakfast with my boys this week. before the first baseball game, we promised the winner the prize of an american breakfast. since the first game ended a little controversially, we decided to play a second and since each team won one game, we decided to serve everyone breakfast. originally we wanted to make pancakes, but when the number doubled from 15 to 30 adolescent boys that we’d be serving, we opted for cereal and toast… which doesn’t sound that exciting, but it’s exciting for them because they never eat cereal (they usually eat some sort of mushy oatmeal stuff for breakfast… i honestly couldn’t tell you what it is). it was fun to see how all these things that were always just in my house growing up, that i never thought about, be so exciting to these kids. we put peanut butter on the toast, which they loved and they couldn’t get enough of the fruit loops and the milk… especially the milk… even when the cereal was gone they kept coming up to ask us to fill their bowls with milk so they could drink it. i know it sounds really cliché to talk about you come to some poor country and suddenly realize all the things you take for granted... but it’s really true.


"where God is, there is joy; where God is, there is calm; where God is, there is happiness." - st. bernard