Posted by:
catnip
(
)
Date: May 09, 2017 01:47AM
He says that one meal sticks out in his memory - one of the earliest ones, meant as a greeting treat.
This was a very poor (like, dirt floors) family in Guatemala. The main dish was plátano soup. Plátanos look like bananas, but are bigger, and have virtually NO flavor. (I had them in Mexico, too, and they really are pretty nasty. Imagine the texture of bananas, only without flavor. Library paste tastes better.)
There it sits, in a shallow soup bowl, with some kind of broth around it. (The broth was pretty flavorless, too.) There were a few scraps of vegetable peelings in the bottom of the plate, for color, I guess. The pièce de resistance was a chicken foot sticking up on each side of the platano.
My DH wasn't sure of the etiquette involved in eating a chicken food, so he watched his hosts before trying it. He said they just crunched off the bones, while chatting away, ignoring the skin and gristle.
DH gave it a valiant effort, and got at least partway through it, before pleading fatigue from his journey and begging to be excused. He comp didn't fare so well. The poor guy could be heard outside, vomiting, for quite some time.
My DH, who had been chunky before leaving, came home about 60 lbs lighter than when he left. And that was not including the parasites he still had to get rid of. That involved a week of hospitalization in the US, with constant IVs, which were, after all, meant to be toxic to the parasites. It didn't make the mishies feel too chipper, either.
The kids were barraged with people from the ward constantly, encouraging them for all the good work they had done among "those poor people," and how they must filled with the spirit.
THEY WERE NOT PREPARED FOR ANY OF THIS STUFF, AND IT WAS HAPPENING ALL AROUND THEM!
My DH is a pretty tough guy, but he was relieved when our older son was assigned to the Bay Area in San Francisco. The younger son refused to go at all.