If you are ever around more than, say, three volunteers at any one time the conversation will inevitably revolve around food we miss from home. Sour cream, good cheese, Guiness, Chipotle burritos and bratwurst were just a few of the foods that were making us salivate this weekend. PCVs can literally go on for HOURS talking about food. So, when parents of Peace Corps Volunteers come to visit, they come bearing gifts of joy. Because they have to. Months before coming down, we send them long lists of things to bring with them. More often not, they are food related...because, well, hot showers just really are not that portable. When my parents came down in December, they brought me a case of Take 5 candy bars among many other delectible delights. Parents also take us to dinner at fancy places that are normally out of the budget of stingy volunteers. So, when my friend Casey's dad came down to visit recently, he took us out to eat at the all-you-can eat tapas restaurant which (wait for this) also features all-you-can wine for a set price (which is roughly the equivalent of 4 days of our salary.) Let's just say it was a glorious time. He is my new BFF. Casey's dad also brought down two suitcases brimming with other goodies, including no less than 100 Clif bars. Dozens and dozens of delicious mounds of healthy soy energy to power us through our jungle adventures. Let the good times roll! Lucky for me, Casey is a very generous person and usually shares the wealth. Clif bars for her, meant Clif bars for me. So imagine our conundrum when we learned that Clif bars were being recalled---something about a peanut poisoning that is plaguing the U.S. of A. Huh? Her dad, being a doctor, texted her and recommended she throw them away. So, what is a poor, hungry Peace Corps Volunteer to do? Do you just throw out 100 Clif bars?...which, is almost one month's salary here and just goes against every grain in your body to waste food? Or do you eat them anyway and risk certain death by Salmonella?
Five PCVs assembled to contemplate this very question. We had just stocked up on boxed wine because the Ecuadorian government just enacted some really rediculous new limitation and taxes on the importation of certain products including shoes and booze. So, instead of guarding our stockpile, we started to deplete it as we debated death and disease and salmonella. We all concluded the following: if we were in the U.S., we would definitely dump the Clif bars. But we are not in the U.S. We are in Ecuador. Where we are surrounded by super germs and giardia every day. Matt reasoned that he lived in China for 4 months, and he was much more likely to get food poisoning or die from salmonella there, than from a silly Clif bar here. He said he would eat it. Her MPH backround kicking in, Case was more cautious. She texted her family to find out just how many people had died from the peanut contamination. 7. Maybe even 8. Humm.... Quite a dilemma. Matt said he was definitely going to eat it. The rest of us decided we couldn't eat the Clif bar alone. So we made a solumn Peanut Pact: We would each eat one of the peanutty Clif bars and risk salmonella together. So as part of our Peanut Pact we slowly and cermoniously ate our Clif bars together.
During our conversation, Jer had been reminscing about Barnyard Busters at TeeJays. He just loves those things. So the next morning he decided to make homemade buscuits and gravy to celebrate being alive. He also made bacon. As Casey would say, it was a "sheer delight." Good ole greasy diner food! Deelish.
Later, Casey took off for Quito. Her parting words, "be sure to text me every 5 minutes to let me know you are still alive."
So far, so good. So, if anyone wants to send some more Clif bars down south, we will happily accept them, fresh or recalled, we don't care. Just don't send more than 2 kg at a time, as we don't want to have to pay taxes on the package. Yes, we're hungry...but we are also cheap.
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