Food Confusion

I was heading home from pasearing when an old lady named Christina stuck her head out the door of her small home and hollered, “Tikan, hague!”, (Come here Sean!). She emerged from her house with a sack, opened it up and revealed that it was filled with trail mix, dried cherries and almonds, soy protein and rice packets, and bags of dried fruits. I thought I was dreaming, it was all the snacks I missed from Trader Joes emerging from this ladies stick home in Cerro Pita. She handed me a packet of rice and soy protein. I looked at it, it was covered in English, and had “packed with love by volunteers” written on the front of the package. She asked me how to prepare it. Sure enough the directions and all the nutrition information were in English, even though it was from an organization that provides food for undernourished children. You prepare it like rice I told her. She sighed in relief. “ OK, that’s what I thought, but we tried to cook this stuff,” mentioning to the trail mix,  “and even put a packet of seasoning in it, but it tasted so bad we couldn’t finish it!” I smiled and tried not to laugh. “Yes, that you eat as is,” I say. “OK, well we thought that with this beef in it you must cook it,” mentioning to a dried cherry. Admittedly it did look like dried beef. I couldn’t hold back the laughter. “No, no, that is dried fruit!” I informed her. “How do you have so much of this stuff anyway?” I ask. “Well the people from the United States were handing it out at a church conference and no one knew how to prepare these packets, and didn’t know what this (the trail mix) was, besides that it had cacao in it,” mentioning to an almond, which does look almost exactly like cacao. “As for the dried fruit, no one liked it, so I collected a sack full, because I knew you could explain it to me.” She continues to tell me a story about getting medicines mixed up and giving her daughter cold medicine for lice, because they also had english directions. It is surprising to me that an organization that provides food to undernourished children would not put the directions in the language of the people it is intended for. It makes me wonder if the food, “packed with love by volunteers”, is principally intended to fill stomachs with food or hearts with the act of kindness of packing them. I left Christina’s house with a bag full of trail mix and soy protein, mind replaying our conversation, and just wishing I had stumbled upon them boiling up a batch of trail mix, throwing some salt and seasoning in and serving up bowls of boiled cherries and almonds.