Guess who's here...

(hint: they're tan from a Miami orientation, are currently in Spanish class in Quito, and are gifted pyramid stackers, apparently)

Cooking Delights

This past Friday, the girls held our first (of hopefully many, hint hint next year's PDs) women's cooking class. Advertised as a class focused on natural ingredients, healthy recipes and new cooking techniques, we found willing participants through Serena's women's exercise group.

When Priya and Mari (summer volunteers) were down here, they worked hard with Serena to pull together a cohesive menu of appetizing, inexpensive, and nutritious foods whose ingredients we could actually access down here. All the women agreed that they more than accomplished their goal. Below you'll find the menu of foods we made, along with one of the recipes. If you're interested in any of the other recipes, please feel free to email me! holland.c.ward at gmail dot com.

The Menu
Homemade Soy Milk (from the beans!)
Iced Chi Tea

Tomato-Corn-Avocado Salad
Grilled Vegetables and Pasta Salad
Drunken Beans

Rosemary Honey Roasted Chicken

Banana Nut bread
Zuchinni Muffins

(Preparing the corn-tomato-avocado salad in the dining room for lack of space in the kitchen!)

(Our taste testers, just making sure we got the flavors right.)

(The whole cooking crew with satisfied bellies and zuchinni muffins in hand)

(Of course, I can't currently find the cookbook we used, but here's a delicious variation of one of the salads we made, a house favorite whenever we can find mangos!)

Avocado, Tomato, Mango Salad

INGREDIENTS
* 1 mango - peeled, seeded and diced
* 1 avocado - peeled, pitted, and diced
* 4 medium tomatoes, diced
* 1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced
* 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
* 3 cloves garlic, minced
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
* 1/4 cup chopped red onion
* 3 tablespoons olive oil

DIRECTIONS
1. In a medium bowl, combine the mango, avocado, tomatoes, jalapeno, cilantro, and garlic. Stir in the salt, lime juice, red onion, and olive oil. To blend the flavors, refrigerate for about 30 minutes before serving.

Easy and delicious and summery. Which works basically year round down in these parts.
-Holly

Green with Envy

Summer left Monday morning. New PDs arrive Friday afternoon. Please forgive me if posting is a little slow this week, we're all trying to catch up on everything we've been too busy to get around to in the past 2 months. Which if you're a procrastinator like myself includes writing transition reports, putting together the house binder, writing the monthly update (oops...), editing Manna's foundational principles, drafting quarterly reports, planning my segment of the new PDs cultural week in Quito, and working with everyone else in coordinating all the new programs at the library during July (tango lessons! theater! electricity class! guitar!).

That said, all I can really concentrate on is our neighbor's garden. I mean, just LOOK at it! It's beautiful! It's filled with life! And color!






Ours is filled with dust and dead things. Please, PLEASE let one of the new PDs have a decent green thumb. Or else I'm going to have to call my parents and beg them to come back to fix our sad little garden.

(sad dead flowers)

(sad barren dirt)

I blame the state of our garden for why I can't get motivated to work. That's a valid excuse, right Dad?

-Holly

Swallowing fears and llapingachos

(And now, a weekend recap by Dunc, who while typing remembered the day old llapingachos in his backpack...good thing he decided to write a blog today, or who knows how long those cheese potatoes would have spent molding in the dark!)

"Giving a speech in front of 7,000 people?! IN SPANISH!?!

Yes, those were my immediate thoughts when Seth announced that we had all been invited to speak at the Inti-Raymi (Quichua for “Festival of the Sun”) in one of the biggest towns in the valley. Magnifying my fears was the fact that Bibi, Holly, and I would be the only ones in town over the festival weekend due to the Amazonian rainforest excursions and glacier-capped mountain climbing adventures of all our other fellow PDs.

Luckily, we were able to round up of a few of our community friends to go with us, including 4-year old Iori, his mother Paola, and 16-year old Christian. While Holly and I occupied the bouncing Iori on the trip up to the festival, Bibi spent a good half-hour convincing Paola and Christian to talk on stage about their experiences as committed library patrons and teen center members, respectively. As we neared the festival, located in a large field nestled amongst the nearby mountains, however, Paola and Christian’s minds began to change. Along with the dancers in traditional indigenous attire, musicians, and food vendors (mmMMM Ecuadorian llapingachos!) came people. And more people. And even more.

(One side of the pentagon of people)

All in all a couple thousand people were in attendance, enough that when we were quickly ushered towards the stage as the dancers ended their performance, Christian and Paola suddenly declared they not only didn’t want speaking roles, but didn’t even want to go on stage! We luckily managed a compromise, and they joined us on stage while agreeing that Bibi would do all the talking. Fortunately, Bibi did a great job calming her own nerves and gave an excellent outline of our programs and services at the library to the suddenly rapt audience.

After exiting the stage and before I could make a beeline for the llapingachos, we were all swarmed by people interested about our programs. In just a few minutes, we gave out more than 200 fliers and offered even more details about MPI. Before heading home for the day, I was finally able to make my way to my long-awaited (like 30 minutes!) snack. The food in my belly just amplified the satisfaction I felt about the afternoon. We strengthened our bond with several of our best community friends, advertised our programs to a large number of people in a new neighborhood, and Holly and I successfully avoided testing our Spanish in front of several thousand Ecuadorians. I guess in situations like these it really pays off to be a Program Director rather than a Country Director…

-Dunc"

On the Cusp

First things first, thank you to everyone who emailed me suggestions. Your encouragement meant so much, and all your ideas were things I needed to be reminded of. So thank you! If I haven't heard from you yet, please don't hesitate to send me an email.


That said, we in the Manna house are on the cusp of big change. Children's Art ended yesterday after a 6 month run, Summer Two heads home on Monday, next year's Program Directors arrive a week from today, new July programing starts next week, and in a few days we'll celebrate one year in South America. Don't worry, I'm stockpiling most of my nostalgic reminiscing for the monthly update and won't go into soggy details here (that's for you, Dunc. Don't want to freak you out with tears or anything). We've got plenty of time for THAT.


To mark the end of Children's Art, I attached a tiny note, art quote and drawing to a brand new box of crayons for each of my bubbly little students; little snapshots of some of the drawings color this post (These are for you, Alecia!). Gotta love the wonders of colored pencils and an Andean afternoon with an open schedule. Apologies for the color distortion, not sure what's up with the brightness of it all.


Children's English also breathed it's last July breath yesterday, celebrated by an afternoon showing of Kung Fu Panda in the teen center (a BIG treat for the little ones who are too young to enter normally), balloons, popcorn, oatmeal raisin cookies, and Fanta. I may have laughed more at the movie than the students, but really, who's surprised by that.

Hope you have fun plans for the weekend! Between trips to the rainforest, climbing Cotapaxi part 2, attending the Gay Pride parade in downtown Quito, and a few things in between, our weekend is set to be eclectically wonderful.
~Holly