Saturday dinner

Like others among us - with the microbus long gone - I got to ride in the back of a pick-up truck, with Pastor Jose Domingo from the Espiritu Santo church, for the short ride from the Peniel church to the Iglesia Familie de Noe, which turned out to be pastored by the husband/father in my host family. Jose Domingo knew what he was doing. He quickly sat right behind the cab and eventually I did too. It is the dry season in Izabal and dust blew hard at us as the truck proceeded down the dirt road. After trying it for one year a couple of years ago, Guatemala - still a pretty agrarian country despite the sprawling Guatemala City - is not on Daylight Savings Time. So it becomes light very early and gets dark early (even though days should be somewhat longer here, since it's closer to the equator). So by the time we got to Iglesia Familia de Noe, it was already getting dark. We ventured into the church's kitchen, and Pastor Jane tried her hand at making tortillas. I'm sure we actually ate this one. We had tortillas with every meal - but unfortunately not beans. Pictured below was my meal. (Notice the beautiful skirts, camisoles, and japiels (sp?) (thin shawls?) on the women helping cook. At home the women might just where the camisoles and the skirts. But this whole outfit is the only obvious signature to us of Q'ueqchi' culture. Some of the pastors (men) were dressed not that differently than I - in khakis and white shirts - but I noticed some bright shirts and once in a while a cowboy hat - which might make the men slightly distinctive compared with North American men, if not Guatemalan Ladino men.) I believe in deference to North Americans like me with Weight Watchers-type diets, at two group meals we were served lots of fresh, uncooked vegetables, which Ellen reminded us we couldn't eat. We felt bad because they would normally have had beans and rice, which we could eat. Uncooked vegetables - presumably watched in water we can't (and no one should) drink wouldn't cut it. We felt bad turning back their hospitality and wasting all the food, which looked good. Our hosts remembered we had liked the fish (local fish, presumably, caught within a day or two out on Lago de Izabal) on the final big day of our 2007 mission trip, and I had told others I wanted fish (I miss Florida fresh fish). And, sure enough did we get fish - whole fish at two of our three group meals. Last tie we got whole fish too, and serving the fish whole (and our hosts at least eating almost all of the fish - I didn't eat the eyes or parts of that side of the head) reminded me of Korea. I'm squeamish about eating with my fingers, but others certainly weren't, which made it easier for them to eat the fish. Using your fingers, it wasn't hard to get around the bones.



It was already getting quite dark inside, but pictured below is part of our table. For the first and only time, the one pastor from far out of town who had brought his family (Pastor Jose from the Livingston area) and his wife, Sarafina, and their two kids (none of them pictured here) ate at the table with us. The next two meals, only the pastors and us ate at the table, which I believe irritated Sarafina (and it was unusual, I suspect, that a Guatemalan woman would make this obvious to us).

-- Perry