Small Wonders

Our last night in Nicoadala, we watched Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in Portuguese and made banana pudding, which between the coal burning stove and my Brasilian/Portuguese-American/English-Dominican/Spanish accented instruction, was quite an experience. I’ve come to believe you can make banana pudding anywhere in the world, and have in fact made it on several continents now. And after all, who doesn’t love fruit, cookies, and vanilla pudding?

After leaving a remote farm where we spent all morning teaching a group of painfully timid kids how to organize and plan a garden, leaving them with a bag of lettuce plants to transplant at sundown when the days heat dissipates, we finally arrived at the main road. No sooner had I sighed my relief at being back on relatively smooth concrete (it’s all relative…) than one of the coordinators in the car announced that she couldn’t find her cell phone. We stopped the car and she got out, looked all around the floorboards, checked her pockets, and finally concluded that she must have dropped it somewhere on the farm. At this point we were already late for lunch and had a 2:00 appointment with another youth group to keep, so I suggested that we drive a little bit further up the road to where we would have cell phone service and call her phone to see if anyone had found it. In a worried frenzy she decided it would be best if we immediately returned to the farm, a bumpy 40 minutes away, and looked for her phone. So at 12:40, I found myself back at the farm, guarding the truck while they walked back through the bush to look for the phone. On a whim, I decided to get out and have a look under her seat, just in case, and what to my wondering eyes did appear but a little gray Nokia, seated squarely beneath the front seat. In disbelief, I asked a man on a bicycle to ride out to the farm and tell them to end their search because the phone had been here all along. Sigh. Upon their return I didn’t get so much as a thank-you or a sheepish apology, leaving me to consider that maybe she thought I had plotted against her to hide her phone all along. Impossible. Still, it was a rough ride back to the highway.

But, as always, dessert fixes everything. A late dinner of fish and rice (surprise!) followed by heaping platefuls of sweet pudding put everyone at ease, and then it was off to bed for one more night’s sleep in this white-washed cement camp I’ve grown fond of in few days. Today, it’s finally off to Morrumbala, my permanent site, just a few bumpy hours away.