Typical Night?

So I just had a really cool night and I thought I’d take you through it. It’s a two part story. The first part begins to take place on a freezing cold night in my back yard. It was there that I was smashing miniature coconuts with the flat side of an axe. My little 12 year old brother and I were tag teaming the process of making something called “mate dulce”. To help with the mental picture, while doing this there were 2 huge oxen about 15 feet away and tons of chickens running around us. My job was to crack the shell of these mini coconuts so he could gather up the coco part for later use. After collecting a few handfuls we took them inside and put them inside a wooden bowl. Then with a kind of wooden hammer we smashed up the coco into something a little thicker than coffee grinds. Meanwhile, my dad was boiling cow’s milk in the other room over a little fire he had just made. He then added some sugar to the milk and moved the fire to the bedroom, where we would drink the “mate dulce’’. Then we filled a wooden cup, called a guampa, with the coco grounds and poured the milk in. In order to drink it up we use this metal straw called a bombilla and take turns filling it up with hot milk, drinking it, and passing it. (this is completely different dink than regular mate, although the drinking process sounds almost identical) To say the least, I absolutely fell in love with this “mate dulce”!!! As we sat there drinking it for the next half an hour I couldn’t help but think about how perfect it was that every aspect of this delicious drink had come from within a few kilometers of my house…the milk, the sugar, the coco, the supplies for the fire. I realize I may be a huge dork for thinking this is an incredible cool experience, but whatever. Actually, I think the only thing that would have made it better would be if I had milked the cow myself, which I plan to soon. (By the way, this drink would absolutely kill at Starbucks if anybody wants to mention it to them.)

The next part of the night deals with the fact that I have recently been teaching my 2 little brothers to use my laptop. Considering that it’s the first computer they’ve seen, let alone been able to use, they absolutely love it….especially the 12 year old. He bugs me like crazy to use it and it is truly a test of my patience but of course I understand where he’s coming from. I mean if I was 12 had a chance to search through endless amounts of amateur porn I’d probably do the same. Only kidding, I would never be that negligent. I keep all the porn on my thumb drive. But seriously, I am teaching how to use MSFT word and how to properly write something, which I do very little of on this blog. Because the education system here is really behind, he’s still not familiar with things like capitalizing at the beginning of a sentence, where to put the period, the commas, etc. The reason for being so behind has a lot to do with the fact that they only go to school for a few hours a day and have no access to books. Therefore, we’ve had a few sessions now on how work the computer in general and I told him his assignment tonight was to write something all by himself. He ended up doing so and when he said he was done he came to get me and we looked over his mistakes. Therefore, we got to hammering away as to how he could improve his writing. Little by little, he would finish, call me back in and we’d go over the paper. As almost 2 hours had passed, the document was starting to read pretty well. While he was sitting there writing, I could hear my music selection of Damien Rice playing from the computer in the next room. Then it happened. All the sudden the he changed the song, which caught my ear, and it was Imagine by John Lennon. For the first 30 seconds I sat in shock trying to figure out why, of the thousands of songs on my computer, he chose Imagine. Could there be a decent explanation for choosing “the song” of songs? Eventually I decided it had to of been just plain coincidence. At the end of the song I went in to ask him why of all songs he chose that one and he reaffirmed that it was chosen randomly. Personally, I think that’s pretty amazing! And on that note, and a personal one, I think there is such an enormous amount of hope in the future of the computer and its ability to bridge the education gap throughout the world. And because internet and computer projects are something that PC volunteers are constantly working on, this was a really inspiring night for me and a great reminder of why I’m here in the first place.

As for what’s to come, this week I am starting to help out on a farm that grows tons of lettuce, onions, carrots and other “garden” style veges. I’m super excited about that and hopefully will have an update about that in my next post. It’s sort of a practice experience during training to prepare for being at my site. I also got a request to talk more about cultural differences, so that will be part of the next one too. Mas tarde.