Banana ball anyone? Imagine the first thing you have for breakfast is a 5 pound mashed banana and onion ball! Can anyone say Emeril?? Bammmmmm. This guy could not make this meal any worse or taste any different. It’s not that it was so bad. It actually had a decent enough flavor. Well bordering on bland but when you are hungry it tastes like a gourmet meal. The problem was that there was so much. Honestly it was the size of a large softball. Fold your hands together like you are praying and then make a big fist. That is how big it was. Try gagging that down with some kind of juice – maska – that they actually spit as their secret, special ingredient. Order me another plate! Not that I a was ungrateful.. I swallowed the eggs whole – so excited to taste something I knew! Ahhhhh finally protein.

Our chicken before……….

 And after…..okay so it ended up as lunch. Had a little trouble eating that meal – I think it was all the feathers we kept seeing that were stuck to the bottom of our shoes that reminded us of the chicken and how we traveled with it on the boat to Tarapoto!

 Here is the final presentation! Chicken soup……who eats hot soup in 90 degree weather and 150% humidity? I think my body temperature rose about 20 degrees. And yes that is plaintain(banana) in the soup. You have to put it in there to soak up the juice in order to eat it. Otherwise it is soooooo dry. Oh and don’t forget the other thing you see is a mystry part of the chicken. Cindy was luck and got a foot in hers. That is a real delicacy. Okay for them not us perhaps.

So if the choices above are not to your liking, how about some fresh fish???? By now you think we would have lost 50 pounds. But no….with all the bread we stuff in our face to ward off the hunger and the cookies we snuck into our bags so we could eat in secret late at night in the wee hours of the morning – we have lost virtually nothing. Oh the agony! One night above the noise of the generator, and the monsoon like rain I heard a crackling noise in the mosquito covered makeshift “bed” next to me. Hmmm I wondered could that be a snack???? Ah ha – I whispered to Cindy so no one would hear and we wouldn’t have to share (nice Christian attitude) – do you have cookies????? After we laughed uncontrollably at my amazing hearing abilities, she answered with a mouth full of two oreos – YES, but I just ate the last two. No worries we had more…….

This was our bathroom in Tarapoto! Not much privacy and not too comfortable. The plastic, although providing some shelter, works much like a sauna. Imagine. No thank you! Cindy and I chose to be “free” and pick trees instead. Glad we did as one of the guys in our group actually broke a board while “going inside” and fell in…..ugh…up to his feet.

Leaving you with that visual…

In His Grip and still eating cookies!

Stephanie