The Care and Feeding of a Gringa in Honduras

Katie D.

July 15, 2011 - 6:27 PM

Living in Honduras has been an intense and layered experience for me. On the one hand, I am researching and working and engaging with topics that are inspiring and heartbreaking, and leave me exhausted at the end of each day. On the other hand, I have encountered an outpouring of generosity and welcome in this country, and an abundance of gifts and food I had not imagined.

The balance is, of course, that I feel happy and cared for, and increasingly feel that I am in the right place for my research and my personal development.

So, what does it take to keep a gringa cared for in food and health?

For one, I keep receiving gifts while out on research. People will buy me fruit or soft drinks, or offering me the shady seat and insisting we move for maximum gringa comfort. Yesterday after an interview, I was accosted by the son of my interviewee, who had been observing my mosquito-bitten state and insisted on applying some kind of cream to the bites. Then he insisted I take the cream with me for future use. The people I am talking to here mostly can't afford medicines for themselves. But I was offered this gift as a guest, and I took it with many thanks (and it has worked better than any anti-itch cream I've ever used). Again and again, I have asked for directions and instead been walked to my destination, or have tried to give up my seat on the bus and instead been told to keep it.

I feel overwhelmingly welcome here.

Best of all is the care I have received from my host family, who worry themselves over my sunburns and mosquito bites (nothing I do seems to keep the bugs away from me), and over the blisters I developed from a new pair of sandals. They keep heaping advice and small helpful items on me, and I am left holding slippers and bottles of water, trying to keep all the different directions and instructions straight in my mind.

But better than this help is the food. I have had a wide range of food experiences here, but mostly for the best. In Tegucigalpa, I got very used to the traditional Honduran breakfast: tortillas, eggs, beans, cheese, and sometimes rice. It's probably the heaviest meal of the day, and I have quickly grown to crave it. Here in El Progreso the breakfasts have been slightly more modest, unless we're in town, in which case we buy balleadas: tortillas with beans and chicken. This has become my all-time favorite breakfast.

I have become adept at eating everything with tortillas. Tortillas here are made of corn, and are small and thicker than grocery store tortillas. About half of each meal is consumed with a fork, and the rest is eaten with a tortilla. Sometimes you pile the ingredients into the tortilla (mini-burrito style), but more often you tear off pieces of the tortilla and use these to pinch up bites of the other food. It doesn't matter what other food, either: beans and rice, fried chicken, seafood, vegetables... I had an interesting cuisine fusion moment yesterday while eating my chop suey with tortillas.

I have been surprised by several things here in Honduras that I haven't encountered elsewhere in my travels. One is a resounding lack of sweets. I don't buy desserts very often when at home, but I love chocolate chip cookies (chocolate in general, in fact) and occasionally enjoy a massive quantity of movie theater candy-the kind that is sweet and sour and sticks to your teeth. None of this appears to be particularly available here.

The other surprise this trip, in both Honduras and Nicaragua, has been the phenomenon of the "drink in a bag." Rather buying a bottle of water, I will often buy a bag of water: basically a vacuum sealed purified water. To drink, you bite the corner off the bag (wincing on my mother's behalf and thinking of all the money spent on orthodontia). On the street, you can buy plastic baggies half-full of fruit juices of all kinds: the vendors simply tie the opening shut, and you either drink through the straw they leave poking out, or you again, bite off a corner and drink that way. It's a very practical system in many ways, although it still strikes me as odd somehow. And today I had my first real dessert treat: my host mom paid $0.12 for the equivalent of a popsicle: frozen strawberry Tang in a bag. Delicious.

When traveling abroad, we all encounter food we simply cannot eat. I have eaten tongue, six-inch-long sardines (bones and tails included), fried beef (delicious), and many, many glasses of Pepsi (which I hate, but can't seem to convince anyone of this fact). But in the midst of all that is strange and new, today I found the one line I will not cross, no matter the cultural implications:

I absolutely and categorically refuse to eat French fries with tortillas. And that is all I have to say about that.