You can't eat mangos with just one thumb. Maybe you can if you're a Dominican, or a primate, but not if you're an inexperienced mango-eating American…like me. So when I got back to my site today after a few days in the capital, craving the end of season mangos, I paid no mind to my band-aid covered appendage and dug right in to the sweet fruit that will be out of season all too soon.
My thumb was covered with this "curativa" because last week, in an effort to peel an eggplant with a machete posing as a kitchen knife, I clumsily cut myself. I was using my vegetable peeler, but when my host mom decided it was taking off too much of the inner vegetable, she replaced it with this huge blade. Just as I was thinking, "this is ridiculous, I have no idea how to use this and am going to cut myself", that's exactly what happened. I cut a deep gash in my left (lucky!) thumb, which would not stop bleeding and scared my poor host mom even more than me. I held it over my head, pressed against a piece of paper until it was numb and only slowly bleeding, while simultaneously talking Mamín (host mom) off a ledge - she felt responsible for giving me the knife, and I spent the rest of the day convincing her that the fault was mine. We finally met in the middle and agreed the knife (machete) was the guilty party.
After a trip to the capital to see friends and use the internet (and even steal a dip in the embassy pool!), it's always a bit hard to begin the 4 ½ hour voyage back to my site. Less than an hour into my return, however, my comfortable campo life came back to me and I was glad to be home. Today I did a few interviews, met some new people that live at the other end of my community (which is quite the hike), and after a conversation with a young girl who very much enjoys caring for all the plant-life on her patio, was gifted some lemongrass roots to plant at my house. I told her I had been looking for it for several months and was so excited to be able to grow and make my own tea! I was also gifted some oranges (the people in my community are really generous) which Mamín made into an excellent juice to accompany my dinner. It's so neat to bring things home from surrounding plant-life and watch her turn them into a staple of our diet. As for the lemongrass, we planted it using compost from our pile (hard-work pays off!) and chopped off the tall leaves to make tea, which I can smell drifting my way from the kitchen as I write.
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