La Vega - Meal Time

I'm back from La Vega and had a wonderful time! God is so good!!! Thanks so much for all of your prayers! It is so encouraging to know that there are so many people praying for us. I told the rest of the team that I had sent an email to about 100 people, put a request on Facebook and in my Blog. I also told them that there were also at least three or four churches from Minnesota praying for us. They were stunned. It is so humbling and encouraging to know this. It means so much to all of us, so thanks to all of you for your prayers. I've said it before, but I want to say it again. Your prayers make you an indispensable part of the mission team!!

Where do I begin??? There's so much to tell - about daily life, about our team, about the people in La Vega and about what God is doing there!! I guess I will start with the basics...meal time!


There were eleven of us who stayed in La Vega for 8 days. We left Wednesday morning (9/15) and returned Thursday evening (9/23). While we were there we focused on two things: the people, getting to know them and sharing God's love and Truth with them and digging a hole, preparing it for the sceptic tank for the church.



Pastor Carlos, Wascar and the team who we were relieving were there with us the first night. One of the first things we did when we arrived was cook for the entire group. We had chicken and plantains. We cooked the chicken over a fire, setting the pot on cement blocks. The first step was cooking the chicken. I'm not sure what they cooked it in - I am assuming water or oil and a little salt. The second step was frying the chicken in oil.













The plantains can be prepared ripe or green, boiled or fried. The first night we boiled plantains - some ripe and some green. The ripe plantains were cut in half and boiled with the skin still on. You can see some in the blue pot to the left of Cornelio. The green plantains ewere peeled first. This is not as easy as peeling a banana!! We had to use a knife to remove the peeling. The most frustrating part is that there is sticky stuff all over the outside of the plantains. It gets all over your hands and is really hard to get off when you are done. I didn't know this at first. My hands were filthy. Eventually I got them clean using a little gasoline!! I got some of the sticky stuff on my clothes, too. I'm not sure if that will ever come off. I guess I learned this lesson the hard way. Oh well - it's all a part of the adventure!! Later in the week we used plastic bags as gloves - that helped a lot and made this chore a lot more fun! The first night the plantains were cooked over the little firepot stand shown below. (I don't know the official name for this.)













Another way to eat plantains however is fried. They call them "fritos." If you have been here with one of the teams, you have had fritos. They are as common here as french fries back home. First you peel them, then cut them in chunks about an inch thick. First they are cooked in grease, then removed to "smash." Then they are fried in grease. Not so good for you, but tasty! You can also see the cooking stove that we used after the first night. In this meal, we had fritos and fried salami.

We ate a lot of rice, too. Rice and plantains are staple foods here in the Dominican Republic. We didn't eat eggs as often as I expected we would. For breakfast we ate sandwiches quite frequently...hotdog buns with cheese or salami. A couple of times they made some hot chocolate to go with our breakfast sandwiches. I liked that a lot! Notice the blue blanket in the picture below. In the kitchen, we always covered the food and clean dishes, so the flies didn't get to it. We didn't have a refrigerator or a coolers full of ice, so Pastor Erickson would go each morning to buy the food for the day.














Serve and enjoy! We usually had some sort of juice or koolaid to drink with our meal. A couple of times we went to a neighbor's house to use their blendor and had juice from the fruit that were grown right there in La Vega - that was yummy!!













After the meal, we did dishes. The guys would carry 5-gallon pails of water each day until we had a large garbage can full of water. I wish I had taken a picture of the big garbage can we used to store the water. Maybe we will see it in the background of a picture sometime.

There is also a picture here of Miguelina doing some laundry.












This is Kristin, signing off!! :) More to come. Have a great day everybody!!