Women's Week in the Finca

This week turned out to be a very fun and very busy week. I got together with another local woman community leader and we decided to hold afternoon jewelry, cooking, and baking classes for the women this week. What a successful week it was. We had 16 women and girls participate in total and here is what we did... *Monday - Planning Meeting *Tuesday - Jewelry making with locally found nuts and seeds *Wednesday - Banana cookies and banana bread (using the tin foil and wire oven over a wood fire stove) *Thursday - Magdalena cake (Latin American specialty dessert) *Friday - Chicken and mushrooms with curry with garden style rice The best thing about these workshops is that the women themselves decide what they want to learn to cook and make and Pascuala and I help them with the recipes, putting the jewelry together, etc. Plus, each woman contributes the cost of the daily course so this way it has more value than if it were a donation since they are paying with their own hard earned money. We build capacity by teaching how to look for recipes and take into consideration things that are available here in the community. For example, with the cooking, we decided on banana cookies and bread since it is banana season here and everyone has so many bananas they don't know what to do with them all. In regards to the jewelry, I mentioned that the tourists we receive in the hotel especially like nature things - so I asked them to find hard nuts and seeds in the community and we made earrings and bracelets from them and then they decided if they want to sell them here in the hotel. We discussed pricing, including the value of their time. I talked about how selling jewelry that they can make for a relatively low cost can be a financial contribution to their family. All in all we had a fun time and I think everyone learned something new, including me. When we made the magdalena cake, I got roped into a contest with Dona Fide. The goal was to see who could turn egg whites into fluffy peaks the fastest, only using a fork to do the beating. Well, I can proudly say I lost, much to the laughter of the women, however, I did manage to get the fluffy peaks and they didn't even spill out when they flipped the bowl upside down to test my work! (I think they were impressed - haha!) Other than that - my days have been action packed as always here. Some of the highlights of the past week include: *Getting stuck in a 1 hour down pour coming back from Antigua after missing the bus in the morning while waiting for someone heading up to the finca. Then, riding up to the finca on the back of a pick up, mud flying everywhere - classic Peace Corps moment. *Tire falling off the bus midway up to the community - ended up sitting in the weeds for an hour after another bus luckily passed by and dropped us a tire off the roof. I'm still scratching those mosquito bites from sitting in the weeds. *Water situation finally is getting better - they tried to make it better by piping in new water to the hotel, but instead they only made it worse by not looking at the current system and installing the incoming line to an outgoing line and the thing exploded. Oh that was fun. Then my water tank was drained and I was left without water. One week later they finally put it back to the way it was and all is well in the world. *Bedroom flooded yesterday during our first big storm of the rainy season - successfully flooded and now cleaned up. *Minor earthquake yesterday to start the day *Finished a great book called Moloka'i, a historical novel based on the life of a girl on the leper colony on the Hawaiian island. Really interesting book - now on to Over the Edge of the World about Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe. That's about it for the week, yes, all that happened in just the last week and that is pretty much life as normal here. We definitely have a lot of fun here and just try to roll with the punches here - you literally never know what might happen next. Thanks for reading! Tara *