I thought of doing a blog solely on the science experiment that is my ‘bano’ but I also wanted to tell you about some of the weird things I’ve been getting for meals here in Campamento….then I realized that since one directly affects the other I can just blog about banos and food together…
My bathroom is actually relatively decent for these parts, consisting of an actual toilet bowl stuck in the dirt which leads down into tubes and a hole away from where our veggies grow. There is a huge bucket next to the toilet which is filled with water that we use to flush, water which then moves the various waste along the tubes and down into the hole where it stays. Every three years they move the tarp and toilet bowl to a new location and put the tubes in the ground again to start over in a new hole. This is certainly a better situation than just a latrine in my opinion. Its just so random, you walk out to the tarp and pull it back and realize that if this tarp were to fall you would be completely exposed sitting on a random toilet bowl in the middle of the field. It’s a fairly hilarious thought when you aren’t living it. Since I am, in fact, going to the bathroom in the middle of a field I’ve encountered all sorts of fun wildlife the most interesting of which is the frog that leapt over me one morning into the water bucket and which my family claims they have never seen. I also saw the frog a few days later waiting patiently to pounce on me from the edge of the tarp…eyes fixated on mine…I figure I’d rather have to deal with a leaping frog than any tarantulas and so far so good, the largest creature I’ve seen was a spider the size of two or three quarters and he was on the tarp right where I had to pass to get out, so I pushed the thing back with lightening speed and ran like the wind back to the house swatting down my clothes and hair the entire way…So far so good in my room, no tarantulas but lots of ants, and last night I saw a black thing scurry out the door and I tried to follow it so it wouldn’t haunt my nightmares but it was gone. Rain came yesterday and soaked through some parts of the wall and I thought that maybe more animals might have gotten in from the damp….a thought that came up in the middle of the night when I heard a scurry scurry munching type noise in the corner of the room….I went after the noise with a flashlight from the safety of my bed but to no avail. The only solution I could think of was to put in my earplugs and forget about it until morning. I’m fairly certain it was a mouse judging by the sound…still would prefer that to tarantula though. By the way, wax earplugs are little miracles, if any of you have any interest in sending me any love, wax earplugs are the way to go….I would almost say they are on par with chocolate. Regular earplugs don’t do much though, sadly.
So in terms of food heres some of what I’ve been getting lately, a nice taste of things I never really thought to try:
Mostly for breakfast I’ve had these variations (of course I notice breakfast more since 1) I‘d be fine not eating it and sleeping instead and 2) I haven‘t had any coffee when I have to eat this:
Potato-like veggie in milk with sugar
Chicken broth soup with flavorless milk curd
Chicken broth soup with popcorn…that I was expected to put into the soup.
The most enormous olive like things I’ve ever seen, black contraptions that are supposedly edible.
Chicken broth soup with dried corn ‘mote’
Rice and lentils before 8 am
Rice and chincharrones…fried pig parts
Corn with milk, mixed together with sugar you can almost fool yourself into it being cereal
However, on the delicious side of things I’ve been getting fresh milk from our cow 2 or 3 times a week and I lap it up like a cat with a spoon of sugar and it might as well be an icecream its so good, relatively I know, but still. Sometimes Elena my host mom boils yerba Louisa into the milk and its delicious. Its also a nice treat because usually for a drink she boils water and we just put sugar into it, its growing on me though….its hot and warms me up. I introduced the fam to hot chocolate packets and watched them take one packet and split it between the 5 of them feeling which left me feeling like a gluttonous savage, but I’ve started only using a little too to flavor my sugar water and its not so bad. Just not so good either.
